


the way back to sea

by ndnickerson



Series: Rain on a Tin Roof [6]
Category: Nancy Drew - Keene
Genre: Coitus Interruptus, Dancing, Engagement, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Jealousy, Kitchen Sex, Missionary Position, Oral Sex, Possessive Behavior, Resolved Sexual Tension, Seated Sex, Sexual Content, Standing Sex, Violence, Woman on Top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 15:20:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ndnickerson/pseuds/ndnickerson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ned figures out how much Nancy means to him. Unfortunately, so does Frank.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Falls about two months after Purity.

He's in New York for the weekend. Not the entire weekend, and he'd be back in Chicago in a second if he could, but it's Friday night and he gets to stand by some long buffet table in a clean-cut tux, and she's not here to see it, to eat him alive with her eyes, to taunt him with her sweet hot breath against his neck, the soft glide of slender fingers under his jacket, heels and matched hips.

He closes his eyes.

The murmur of the crowd rises for a minute, the din of dishes and silverware and champagne flutes. He's only here because his boss almost promised a promotion if he came, and shook hands with these people, women with sticker nametags peeling from their polyester lapels, the skin above their upper lips gleaming, the small tufts of hair like wings standing above their ears. Right now Nancy is probably bent over her discolored plastic bathtub, back at her own apartment, while Sam splashes and giggles in a bubble bath. He knows Friday nights are for bubble baths. Serving as Sam's substitute father for the two months he's been Nancy's boyfriend, has done that.

And he doesn't mind it, to be honest. He doesn't mind the floppy rag dolls or the scattered mismatched playing cards or the pastel tulle Sam leaves behind. He's become accustomed to making Sam banana pancakes on Saturday mornings.

For the two months since Frank signed the papers, he hasn't been back to Chicago. Ned's close to Bayport and he knows how easy it would be, to drive past that house, by the Hardys'. Nancy told him about the Christmas tree. He imagines that it's still there, brown and dead, standing on a stack of shed pine needles.

Ned doesn't know why he's thinking about it, about that cold empty house, the place where she lived before, why he's thinking about going anywhere near Frank Hardy. If he—

"Ned."

There's a bit of a question in the voice and Ned opens his eyes. Oh, the rest of the women are in two-piece suits, shoulder pads, their hair twisted up and shellacked to their heads, but this one's younger, her hair spilling down, her jacket open to reveal something in gleaming wine-dark satin that stretches tight over her flat belly. She's not beautiful, but there's something in her face, the frank calculation in her gaze.

"You look like you're having the time of your life."

"Maybe I am."

He takes one of the paltry palm-wide paper plates and spoons a couple handfuls of nuts and dinner mints onto it, then smiles at the girl, whose name he doesn't remember. In his previous life a lot of nights started this way.

"We're in New _York_," she sighs. "There are a thousand better things to be doing. You're from Chicago, right?"

He nods. "And you?"

"Boston." Her lips curve up at his questioning glance. "Not for that long. You doing anything after this?"

Ned looks down. Pastel dinner mints and cocktail peanuts; no inspiration there. "Stumbling drunkenly back to my hotel," he replies. "I hope."

"There are some of us going to a bar up the street a couple blocks," she says, and he can feel her gaze shift down to his left hand. His skin there practically prickles in gooseflesh. Even asleep he can feel the gaze of a woman on his left ring finger, when it lingers there even the weight of a second. The sensation completes its own circuit, independent of thought or intention.

"If you want to come."

He agrees and tells her he'll only be a minute, and when he's sure they're gone he hails his own cab. It isn't so late yet. She'll still be awake.

"Hey baby."

Nancy lives with him, informally, half-time. They never talked about it or arranged it. Three weeks after her divorce was final he realized that they had spent every weekend together, in their small patched-together family, she and Sam. Thursdays after work, now, she shows up, with Sam in tow; she has her own key and she has her own apartment, which she leaves for on Sunday nights. There hasn't been a sign of Frank during that entire time, a phone call or visit, unless she's been playing things close.

"Hey," she sighs. She sounds like she's in bed, her voice quiet and softly husky, and he can't hear Sam. "On your way back yet?"

"Not yet. My flight's still first thing in the morning."

"And I'll be at the airport at nine."

Ned smiles. He can hear the meter ticking from the front seat, and his fingers are steady. "I miss you," he admits, his own voice going soft.

"I miss you too," she says. "You all right?"

"Nothing spending the rest of the weekend with you can't fix."

She chuckles. "Are you being a bit presumptuous, Mr. Nickerson?"

"What, I leave town for a day and you hook up with someone else?" He keeps his voice light, because this isn't something they tease about, not yet. Not quite.

"Yeah," Nancy teases him back. "She's short and a little bossy and she sleeps with a yellow dog."

"Sounds charming."

There are no stars in New York. The light bleeds up from the horizon, poisoning the sky, even when Ned cranes his neck all the way back.

"How about you?"

Her voice is light too, but it's the faint press of velvet over steel, and he closes his eyes again.

"I'd rather be with someone short and a little bossy who sleeps with a yellow dog," he murmurs. "And you."

Ned nurses his drinks. Scotch on the rocks, a dash of soda to keep it interesting. Soon the girl who picked him up has her jacket draped across the back of her chair, and when she sweeps her hair back behind her ear he catches the blurred dark lines of a tattoo, the edge showing from under her slender sleeve. Her foot taps against the metal rest on the barstool.

When he knows that he's noticing it, he hangs his head. He looks back up a moment later, and she's not quite smiling at him, but it's close.

"You have a girlfriend?"

In the space of a few more drinks, three for him and two for her, she's sitting next to him, leaning heavily on her propped elbow and cupped palm, her hair swinging, in that funny way some girls have when they've had too much to drink.

"I have a girlfriend."

"Serious?"

He pauses too long, and he knows he's pausing too long. "Serious," he affirms, over her soft chuckle.

"And she's back in Chicago."

He hasn't slept with anyone other than Nancy in almost a year, and their sexual relationship has been sporadic, intense, consuming. And he's told her, that they should use this time to figure out what they want, if they're meant to be together, and she is no more bound to him than he is to her, and he might be her boyfriend but that's nothing; he was her boyfriend before and it didn't make any difference.

He knows that's the scotch talking, but it's also on the tape that's constantly going in his head, it's just right now that it's a little bit louder than normal. She can swear all she wants, she can promise to be faithful all she wants, but she can't reach inside his head and flick a switch and make him stop remembering. It's his safety.

The girl by his side, this Rose, her head cocked and waiting for his response, is sending out clear signals, and for the longest time there has been no angel and devil arguing over his shoulders, just a single voice, considerably lower, unchallenged.

"She's in Chicago and we're here," Ned agrees.

\--

There are two ways this can end.

He wonders how her lip gloss would taste. The kind Nancy wears, the kind she sometimes smears on her fingertip and paints Sam's lips with, tastes slightly sweet, sticky against his tongue. He wonders how her neck would feel under his kiss and Nancy's is smooth, beating faintly and warm with her pulse.

He can stumble back to his hotel room alone, in the orange glare of the streetlights, the taxis' headlights turning him blind, or they can take a ride back and she can arch over him, against the coarse starched sheets, obeying the prosaic impulse of a thousand other nights, the same old situation.

It takes him seventeen minutes to figure out that it's Nancy he wants.

He laughs out loud and Rose stares at him like he's lost his mind, her own gaze lingering on him too long. She's not the kind of girl who would need to get drunk, for this, but it's a good excuse, it's always been a good excuse. It's an easy way to get into a cab together and end up making out. He's used it himself too many times. Not on Nancy. Maybe just not yet.

"You're not one of those crazy drunks, are you?"

"No," Ned replies, gasping a little as he finally chokes off his laughter. "Um. I'm sorry. Thanks for inviting me. I just figured out I need to get home."

She raises an eyebrow. "Yeah," she agrees, patting his shoulder. "Sleep it off. It's been a long day."

On the walk back, he knows he should probably be a little more observant or cautious but he keeps going over it in his head. It was because Rose wasn't drop-dead gorgeous, it was because he wasn't drunk enough, it was because he had just talked to Nancy and he felt guilty, it was because...

"Well, I am in love with her," he mutters, and a couple dressed for the opera, moving toward him on the sidewalk, sidles away with their gazes averted, and all he does is smile. "It's just that that never stopped me before."

But he's never been with anyone for as long as he's been with her, and they match, they fit. He knows how to touch her, how she moves, and it hasn't gotten old, not yet, and he thinks probably not ever. He misses her when she's not around, and he hated sharing his bed before but he misses sharing it with her. He misses the way her body fits against his when they curl up together. He misses Sam bouncing on his bed in the morning and singing the two of them awake.

He misses the smell of her, the way she tastes, the lock of her gaze with his. He missed some variation on those things before, but it hadn't been enough.

He's waiting for the elevator to slide into place behind the gleaming brass panels, and his reflection is muddy and dim with fingerprints, the glaze of age. He gave Nancy that speech, and he'd meant every word. Eight weekends isn't long enough. Anyone can be faithful for two months. She's been faithful for two months, to him, before, when things were easier and he'd never thought she'd leave, no matter what, not like she did.

It's too soon for this. It's too soon to know this, to feel this way, but he knows that if Rose were beside him, calm and detached, if he were to take her back to his room and press his fingertips over all the scarred ink on her skin, it would all burn. Every inch of her. He'd kick her out after an hour and curl up in the bed, drenched in grief. He would go back to Nancy and, God, she'd slap him or she'd walk out with that pale stricken look on her face and there would be no going back. He's left the door open, he's made sure that he has a way out, that he can blame anything he does on the depth of her betrayal, but it's a door he'll never walk through, and he knows that now.

He's sealed in and the water just keeps rising.

\--

"Hello?"

She catches her breath. "Oh. I was—expecting your voicemail. Did I wake you up?"

Ned chuckles. "No, it's all right."

She's still quiet but she sounds more awake than when he called her a few hours before. "I was just—still missing you. Remember when you were still at Emerson and we'd call each other at three o'clock in the morning, when I was working on a case..."

Her voice is easy, because of what she's not saying _(and then i cheated on you and got knocked up and you slept with everything in sight for the last year you were there?)_, and he responds to the genuine warmth and longing of it. She only called him at three o'clock in the morning when she was desperate, at the end of her rope, entirely unsure of where to go or what leads to follow, if any, and that was only a few times. As he's told her too many times, she's self-sufficient, almost intimidating in her insistence that she doesn't need anything or anyone. And he, responding to some basic inequality in their relationship, almost never called her at three o'clock in the morning. Part of him had been convinced that, short of life-threatening illness or promise of another case, she'd hang up on him in four seconds flat.

"Yeah, I remember nights like that."

It takes a long moment for her to answer. "Are we okay?"

Ned puts his forehead against the glass and closes his eyes, and he can feel every bit of pressure on his skin, the weight of his watch band, the texture of his clothes. He's spent weeks not thinking about this, but she has changed. She makes coffee in the mornings, she kisses him in public, and maybe three years kept locked like a princess in a tower has moderated it somehow but she no longer brings her work home with her, not like she did, not so that it bleeds into every moment, poisons it, makes it less. Yes, sometimes, she still gets that look in her blue eyes and jots down something, or goes to the phone and has some barely-restrained, gleeful revelation of a conversation with someone in the office. And then she comes back to him, curls up on the couch with her feet tucked under his thighs, and when he sleeps she sleeps with him.

Maybe before he never could have called her at three o'clock in the morning, and maybe eight weeks isn't enough, but he knows for damn sure that she would never have been able to ask him that, before. Not like this, not out of the blue, when he's four states away, with no provocation. Based on something he himself can't even elucidate, yet.

"I think we are."

"You sounded different earlier." She sighs. "Do you know how long it's been since I've woken up on Saturday morning without you? Sam's going to want pancakes, and you, you sweetheart, always bring me coffee..."

_Sweetheart._

"It's not that hard, I have it on a timer. You know you can go over there, right? Keep my bed warm for me, get Sam all settled in, and in the morning..." She chuckles and he finds himself smiling too, "in a few hours I'll be there, and if you're half as tired as I am, we can sleep the entire damn day."

"Maybe not the entire day."

He glances out the window at that moment and his stomach lurches, but he nods anyway. "Maybe not the entire day," he agrees. "Go to sleep. I'll be there soon."

The cab driver has to be used to things like this. He hasn't said a word and the meter just keeps clicking, and Ned can't even get out of the car now; there are no lights, just the moon on the water and a yard kept carefully landscaped by someone who actually gives a damn, all empty. Like staring at a graveyard, a broken leg. He thought it would help him remember, or maybe it's just some small way of paying his penance for what he's done and what he's trying to stop himself from doing.

This is where she lived when he first gave in. This is the house Frank bought for her and Sam to fill and make into his home. He has never seen it, before tonight; he never met her here, never snuck in after dark while Frank was away and violated their bed. There's nothing wrong with the house. It just stands empty and feels empty, from here, without even the ghost of anything she left behind. He had kept a monopoly on her ghost, all those years, keeping alive what she had with him, until she could return to be that girl, that woman again.

_You could give her this and it still wouldn't be enough._

Somehow that strident cautionary voice is drowning in the roaring in his ears, and the water's rising. He knows it. Even this house isn't enough to scare him, and that's a bad sign.

"Take me back to the hotel," he says, defeated, and his gaze stays out the window and here, at least, the stars aren't washed in poison.

\--

On the plane he falls asleep, cramped uncomfortably between a large woman who looks flushed and self-consciously uncomfortable, and a bearded man who drowses with his damp forehead pressed against the unshaded window. He dreams of following Nancy to some hotel done in red velvet and paisley wallpaper, and when he pushes open the door of the room the pit of his stomach lurches sickeningly and she's there, her mouth fallen open, her hair in her face, and Frank is there, and Ned slumps to the floor and puts his head in his hands and she doesn't say anything, because there's nothing to say.

"Coffee, sir?"

From the exasperated look on the air hostess's face this isn't the first time she's asked him, and Ned's gaze keeps shifting, after he blinks himself irritably awake. He can't even look straight at her. "No. Thanks."

Nancy's in an oversized t-shirt and a pair of jeans that cling to her, with her hair raked back under her sunglasses and Sam cradled on the point of her hip, and when she sweeps Ned into a one-armed hug, he can feel Sam's small arm against his side, and he closes his eyes.

"God, I'm so glad you're home."

They take her car back to his apartment, pull the blinds tight and slump on the couch in front of the television set, and even though he feels the familiar impetus to stay awake until Sam's safely passed out for her nap, he can't hold out. There's some Hitchcock movie on when he finally succumbs, his head heavy on Nancy's shoulder. He can feel her hand moving on his hair and then he's gone, paralyzed in some dreamy clear state, where he can hear but the words don't mean anything and sometimes Sam bumps against his shins, and Nancy makes soft shushing sounds.

Sam. There will be weekends, he's sure, when Sam is with Frank, and his apartment won't smell like play-doh and crayons, and Ned knows that he won't feel anywhere near as safe and content as he does right now. Despite it all, despite the cockblocking and Sam climbing into his lap at the most inopportune moments, her demanding banana pancakes, and Nancy's refusal to sleep naked, despite everything he misses Sam when she's not around.

"Make a picture?"

"Do you want me to make a picture? I can't right now, Ned's sleeping on me."

Sam giggles. "Move him!"

"I can't. I wouldn't move you if you were sleeping on me. Are your crayons in your backpack?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Can you make me a nice picture?"

"With a house?"

"With a house, and sunshine, and a garden."

"Like the house with Daddy?"

Nancy tenses under him, and he doesn't, he can't move, but her voice betrays none of it. "Or a nice green house. I like green."

"I like green too."

He falls asleep then, finally, his arms sliding around her, and this time he doesn't dream. In his sleep he feels feverish, and he rises every now and then, far enough to hear the dramatic soundtrack stabs and brisk overlapping dialogue of another movie, Nancy shushing Sam's bright patter. Then her fingers are cool on his forehead and he slumps down, his cheek against her thigh. He can feel Saturday draining away, by the inches of sunlight in warm thin stripes on the couch, but he's with her, and Sam, and he just wants peace from the chaos New York brought him. He doesn't have to decide all this; everything is comfortable, and safe, and Nancy is making no demands, and he has no sins to confess. Not really. Not to her.

He smells pepperoni. He's under the afghan that was thrown across the back of the couch, with a small hard square of a pillow under his head, and the room is a thousand times dimmer, still warm from the waning daylight. She's curled up at the other end of the couch but still near him, because he's that tall and she hasn't left herself that much space, and the pizza box is open on the coffee table. She looks bemused, and when her voice comes it has the rusty edge of unuse in it.

"I would've cooked..."

He stretches and flings the afghan away, unmindful of where it falls, and his breath is too loud, even in his own head. "It's okay," he says thickly. "Where's Sam?"

There are three impressionist drawings done in crayon on construction paper, laid out like some cryptic triptych, like a rendition of a wobbling hurricane. "Late nap, or down for the night," Nancy replies, stretching, and of its own volition his gaze slides down to measure the slope of her breasts. "I don't think she knows which yet."

"How long until we're safe?"

Nancy shrugs. "I'll get her some water in a little while, but she's probably worn out. How are you feeling?"

"Like I've lost half a day and most of the weekend," he murmurs.

She smiles. "But you've still got Saturday night," she says softly. "And that's the best part."

He thinks about going to the kitchen and finding one of his bottles, after his second slice, but it's not as fun to drink when Nancy doesn't, and Nancy doesn't drink when Sam's around. She unfolds and goes to the other part of the apartment, and from behind Sam's cracked bedroom door he can hear Nancy speaking softly to Sam, and then she comes back with a sweating can of cola and puts it on the low coffee table for him.

"I gotta go take a shower."

She keeps her eyes on the television but she smiles and nods slightly. He wipes the grease off his fingers and slides his arm around her shoulders, but there's nothing on television, and he's starting to get a headache.

"Sam's asleep," she says softly. "So it's all right."

He kisses the side of her head before he vanishes into his bedroom, leaving a pile of clothes at the bathroom door. He stalls, waiting for the water to warm, and his hair is barely wet when Nancy steps in behind him, her hair pinned up in a messy ponytail.

"Are you actually awake?"

"Awake enough," he retorts, rubbing his hand through his hair as he turns to face her. "For a while. I'm counting on you to tire me out."

"How can I turn that down," she smirks, and her eyes gleam when she's like this. Unselfconscious, naked, slim smooth fingers that trace over the line of his side, his hips. There are small silver-pale marks low on her belly, the skin stretched taut and thin, and when he runs his fingertips over them she cringes back. Not in pain, though. Stretch marks, from when Sam grew inside her, from when another man's child grew inside her.

"Don't."

Her voice holds no conviction, and the shower beats down on his shoulders and back as he moves toward her. Usually his fingers just brush her belly on the way to the wet warmth between her legs, and he doesn't linger like this, but there has to be some way to pay his penance for his near miss, and reminding himself of what she did won't be enough, but at least it's something.

"Does it hurt?"

She shakes her head and the cooler air or the pressure of the water or the sight of him naked has made her wet, he knows it, by the hard tips of her nipples. He has a perfectly good bed no more than ten feet away but he can still feel the recycled air on his skin and he still hasn't been able to wash the memory of that unrealized sin away.

With one last slow touch he moves back again, all he needs is five damn minutes, but when his back is to her she steps back into him, her breasts pressing against him, and her warmth radiates like a brilliant fever against his skin. He can't concentrate. He uses her conditioner instead of his own shampoo, and doesn't protest when she takes the soap, working it between her palms until her hands are covered in thick white lather and if he turns, he'll just pin her against the wall and fuck her until he comes or he slips and they fall with bone-jarring speed, still joined, to the bottom of the tub, one or the other, he can't put up with this anymore.

"You?"

"I don't want to smell like Old Spice," she says, chuckling, and he doesn't bother correcting her because she already knows. He never smells like Old Spice, and he clumsily builds the lather on his own hands, tracing it over her curves, lingering sometimes until she gasps and arches, into his touch or away from it. Her lashes are darker when they're wet, and with her face scrubbed fresh she looks younger, more like who she was.

She kisses him when he turns the water off. He can feel her fingers, sliding up over his shoulder, curving against the back of his neck, pulling him down to her. He goes cold, still dripping wet, before he boosts her up and she wraps her legs around his waist, groaning softly in protest when he half-slams her against a wall.

They've usually had a lot of sex by now. Sam takes naps, and usually sleeps all the way through the night, and his body knows hers, it's all too familiar. Sometimes he wakes and she's only half-aware and they're already grinding together, her nails digging into his skin, his fingers between her thighs. He hated sharing his bed. Now he hates not sharing it.

"Ned..."

He needs to be awake for this, if he's going to do this, but right now it's too hard to maintain his balance, and the angle has to be right, and it's simpler to wrap the both of them in a bath sheet and carry her to the bed with him, naked and slick, her hair damp under his fingers. Foreplay is for other nights. She rolls him onto his back and he closes his eyes, the mattress shifting under him with each rock of her hips. She drags her knuckles up the underside of his cock, the cool points of pressure against his flesh, and he reaches for her, cupping the spread of her outer thigh.

"Come on," he breathes, like a prayer. "God, I missed you, please..."

Her hair is warm, trailing against his mouth, when she leans down and brushes her lips over his jaw, his neck, his collarbone. She kneels, legs doubled and thighs spread wide, nipping at his skin, and she urges closer and he's barely breathing. Her fingers stroke the angle of his cock, maneuvering him into position under her, and then he's pressing up, parting the tight heat of her, and she's already slick, trembling.

"Mommy?"

He's half inside her and with the way she comes, it will still be a while, so he shoves his face into the pillow and groans in deep, despairing frustration as Nancy swiftly dismounts him, already searching for her robe.

He pulls his face back long enough to say, "Don't get mad if I finish while you're gone."

"As long as you won't be finished for the night," she murmurs, digging in his dresser for a clean pair of boxers to toss at him before she opens his bedroom door.

And he waits as long as he can, half a lifetime, but he can't wait too long, and he has the towel wrapped around him, still damp and smelling of his soap and her clean skin, when he realizes that it's been ten minutes and she's still gone.

When she pushes the door open, five minutes later than that, Ned sits up, and he can hear Sam's barking cough before he sees her. "Um, Sam's not feeling well..."

She has all the familiar things in her arms. Sam's clutching the yellow bunny Ned gave her, and Nancy has a bowl in her hands, a towel draped over her arm, a cracked can of soda hissing gently to itself.

"I'll be on the couch."

Nancy opens her mouth, and Sam is tracking him with her perfect blue eyes, but he pauses in the doorway, sweeping his arm. "It's all right. I hope you feel better, Sam."

Sam brings her hand to her mouth and stifles another cough without breaking his gaze.

\--

She finds him watching an infomercial at three o'clock.

He never slept on the couch-bed before, and he thinks maybe he still won't. The bar hits him at just the wrong place on his back, and the mattress is thin. Every time he's almost, almost able to drift off, Sam coughs from behind the half-closed door and his stomach clenches and he's awake again, and he's given up for a little while.

"She okay?"

Nancy pulls his door quietly closed behind her and steps into the arc of blue light from his nearly mute television set. "Her fever's gone down," she says softly. "I think in the morning she'll be fine. Why are you still awake?"

"If you thought I wasn't awake, why'd you come in here?"

"Maybe I like watching you sleep."

He chuckles and slides over as she sits on the edge of the bed, next to him.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to kick you out of your bed."

Ned shrugs and nuzzles into her shirt, the warmth radiating from her skin. "It's all right."

"'Cause, I was coming in to tell you that we'd be on the couch."

He glares up at her, without rancor, and she cracks a broad smile.

"Seriously. I guess you don't like the idea of her sleeping with us?"

"Says she who won't sleep naked, with me?" Ned glances at his bedroom door, then back at her. "After all the times we've woken up halfway doing it, no. I don't like the idea."

"Never?"

He catches himself before he asks it, and instead settles on "Does she sleep with you a lot?"

Nancy shakes her head, sliding her feet under the sheet. "Not very often. And it's okay, I understand."

"It'd be different..."

"If she was yours?"

His mouth tightens, just a little bit. "If we weren't having this much sex," he says, and he can see her nipples standing under her thin shirt, and despite himself he's already half-hard. "I'm getting used to sharing my bed with one, give me some time before we try for two. And, do you honestly think that's why?"

She looks down. "In the shower," she mumbles, and that's all she says, and he slips his hand under the hem of her shirt and finds the paler patches of skin by feel alone.

"That has nothing to do with it," he says softly. When his fingertips move she flinches away from him, but by the sheer persistence of his gaze he manages to catch and hold hers. "Stay with me tonight."

"Sunday night."

He nods, answering the faint question in her voice, and with every soft stroke of his fingers the expression in her eyes goes a little more distant.

"I'll stay with you."

He pushes himself up to sitting and she swings her knee over his hips, tracing her mouth in soft sweet kisses over his face, and he twists his fingers in the hem of her shirt and pulls it tight over her breasts. "Fast or slow," he breathes against her mouth. "Fast," she breathes back, and she moans against his neck when his thumbs trace her nipples through the fabric, when he shifts up and she sinks to meet him.

"I hate this bed."

"More than the floor?"

Her inner thighs are smooth against his bare hips, his teeth brush her throat and her voice comes in half-mumbles, distracted whispers. "Not more than the floor," he growls back, because she's wet and he's wanted this, since she swung away from him, since she left him alone. She grinds into him, hard, tossing her head, her hair tumbling down her back, and her skin is blue in the light. She's flush and tight and he meets her, shoving himself up deeper, harder, harder, until she's all he can feel. She whimpers, breathy, soft, and he catches her earlobe, the side of her neck, his hips shaking under hers, and he's ten seconds from taking her and pushing her onto her back, so he can control it, so he can see her face under his, but then she begins to come and he groans as he follows, fingers groping at the back of her shirt.

"I want slow," he murmurs, after, while they're still joined and he's still inside her and she still has her eyes closed, her lashes thick and dark on her cheeks. "I want slow tonight."

"You'll get slow," she breathes, and when she pulls back even the slightest bit her brows knit. "As long as I'm on top."

"What do you call that?"

Her mouth curves up, and he watches her face clench a little when she pulls back. "Impatience."

\--

"Going to church?"

The couch-bed is safely folded and out of sight, under them. Ned's blearily watching some talking-heads political show, sitting on the couch next to Sam, who is ready for church in a frilly dress with her hair pinned up in ribbons, but her feet are still bare and Nancy's in the shower, where she can't save him, and he can't leave Sam alone just to go spend some naked quality time with her mother. Not when Sam will soon be safely in church and later he can have plenty of naked quality time with Nancy.

"No," he says, with a half-chuckle, rubbing his palm over his hair. "I'm not."

"Why?"

He shuffles through the reasons in his head, but Sam is four and in the end he just shrugs. "I just don't."

"Are you sick like me?"

"Are you still feeling bad, honey?"

Sam shakes her head, serene, her blue eyes steady on him. Then she slides over next to him and leans her small head against his side, with his arm over her shoulders.

"You come, 'cause Grandpa gives me candy. Maybe he'll give you some."

Ned chuckles and when Nancy emerges from his bedroom, rubbing a towel over her wet hair, she takes their pose in and a faint smile broadens on her face.

"Come to church, Mommy."

She goes, for that time, she takes Sam to River Heights to go to church with Carson and he thought that she usually went with them, but he catches the subtle shift in her expression. She doesn't.

"I don't have anything to wear."

He doesn't know why he says it, but he shrugs and comes out with "We could drop by your place on the way out of town."

"We?" Her lips thin, just a little bit. "You gonna wear your blue suit?"

"Yeah," he says, with a touch of mock defiance in his voice. "I'll wear my blue suit."

They just stare at each other for a long moment, daring the other to blink or laugh or call it off, but in the end he just stands and says "I guess I'll go take a shower then."

Nancy's sitting on his bed when he gets out, next to the blue suit, cool and sexy in her jeans and loose white button-down. "Are we really doing this?"

He shrugs. "We used to go to church together," he says, keeping his voice light, as he goes to his closet for a shirt and tie. "If we're coordinating, should I go for the blue crepe?"

She sighs. "It's in River Heights. And my dad will be there. We usually eat with him after..."

"That's fine."

She studies him. He feels the weight of her gaze until he finishes buttoning up his shirt and looks back at her, standing in his boxers.

"Blue tie?"

"Blue tie," she agrees. She stands and heads for the door, then stops, with her hand resting on the knob. "Look..."

His nerves aren't frayed, not yet, and he's not sure why he feels the way he does right now, but his eyebrows are just beginning to draw together in that certain expression of exasperation, impatience. Maybe with himself.

"Thanks."

"For what?"

She just shrugs a little, waiting for him to step into his pants before she opens the door. "Everything," she finishes, and he knows that's not what she wanted to say, but he lets it go.

\--

They've almost always gotten along, Ned and Carson. They watch ballgames together and eat Hannah's cooking and, for a long time, they have been joined by that one tenuous link. They both love Nancy, would both lay down their lives for her, to make her safe, to protect her. Now they both love Sam, too.

And Carson's paying attention. Ned's aware that Carson's watching him, carefully, watching him interact with his daughter and granddaughter, and if there wasn't that past history built between them, the baggage of the years he'd loved Carson's daughter, Ned would have shown off, hyperaware, uncomfortable. As it is he does nothing different, but he feels a rush of strange pride whenever Sam does talk to him, when she flirts outlandishly, when Nancy leans over to whisper something to him soft and secret.

The way Nancy looks up when they walk into the church, it's like she's expecting lightning to strike. Ned's just never thought about it. He goes to church with his parents, when he goes home, Christmas and Easter, Thanksgiving and his birthday. He shakes hands with his parents' friends, the ones who remember him from childhood, and there is no lightning, he doesn't hiss when the light streams through the stained glass windows and touches his flesh.

And sometimes on those Sunday mornings he used to wake with the smell of other women in his bed, his skin still sallow with temporary alcoholism, but that was not who he was. He may have woken this morning cold and uncomfortable, cramped and aching from half-drowsing on a thin sofa-bed, the taste of Nancy's skin still blurred in his mouth, but there is no sin in it. It's just the next step, the logical culmination of everything he lost and regained. It's only when he falls back into that familiar depression, the pessimistic certainty that her betrayal of him with Frank wouldn't be the last, that he begins to question it, that he hasn't found the woman he'll spend the rest of his life with. If only because she won't stick around long enough. It's just a question of when she'll slip.

Then there are mornings like these, and he never foresaw them like this. Nancy's ill at ease, closed away from him, her eyes down, her body language hostile. He reaches for her hand and squeezes softly and she smiles down at her hymnal, just a little, without looking at him, without returning the gesture. She's coiled tense, and he half-expected her to shrug his hand away, like she's ashamed of him, of this, of being with him like this two months after her divorce.

And he realizes that some of the people in this church probably saw her with Frank, probably even attended her wedding, and most of these people he hasn't seen since he and Nancy were together before. Sam's in the back with the rest of the primary children, probably coloring violently with her legs splayed out in opaque stockings and shiny patent-leather mary janes. He's just with Nancy and Carson now.

They all make lunch. Ned boosts Sam up onto his shoulders and she watches him deftly baste and flip meat on the grill, while Nancy makes salad and Carson makes potatoes. Sam has her own sippy cup and she's none the worse for wear, even though her eyes are on level with his knee she managed to kick him out of bed the night before, regardless. She has to have slept better than he did.

"How's business, Ned?"

It's like picking up a conversation that's been on hold for the years between. From the things Nancy's said, from the expression in Carson's eyes, Ned's pretty sure Carson knows more than he probably should, but there hasn't been any judgement or anger in that careful look, and Ned feels almost preternaturally calm. He's passed the test, somehow.

"Good. Things are good. How's the law?"

"People just keep breaking it."

Ned's smile only falters a little when he imagines Frank stumbling through this same conversation with Carson, just over four years ago.

\--

"You okay?"

Ned's tie is already in his pocket, his collar loose. He carried Sam inside, half-drowsing, and left as Nancy started to change her into a cotton t-shirt and pants, in her own bed. Nancy left her heels back on the living room's hardwood floor, and now she's unbuttoning her dress, swiftly.

"Are you?"

She stands in her slip, the color of coffee and cream, and he wants her but the sun is still dying outside and Sam won't be asleep for long, he knows that.

"Sam and I used to go to church."

She perches on the end of Ned's made bed, and he never makes his bed, it has to have been her, in clean crisp sheets and hospital corners. He steps out of his pants and hangs them up, slowly, feeling that peculiar vibration in her voice.

"I had to fill up," she takes a breath, "my time when I was alone, with her, because I couldn't get a job, and I'd take her to church at our new house, but I couldn't meet anyone or do anything, because no matter what I had this little Siamese twin. I got so sick," she rubs the sides of her fingers under her eyes and smears the trail of mascara, "of babytalk and cartoons and singalongs. And I haven't been to church since I realized that I didn't want you to leave my life."

"Why?"

He watches his knees and the rise and fall of her breath from the corner of his eye, and he waits. "How do you just separate it," she murmurs. "Because I can't."

"What is there to separate?" He touches her knee, peeking out from beneath the slip.

"You weren't cheating. You weren't risking everything."

"Don't you remember what I told you? I never wanted to have an affair with you. And having sex three times in six months... that wasn't an affair. What we have, isn't an affair. Are you ashamed of us?"

He forces himself to keep his gaze on hers, and she closes her eyes. "I'm not ashamed of us. I'm ashamed of the circumstances and the way this happened, but I'm not ashamed of being with you. Of us."

"Do you really feel like you risked everything?"

"If he knew..." She shakes her head, slowly, and her eyes are red. "Do you know I'm almost glad that I haven't heard from him, since we signed the papers? It's not normal for it to be like this. Sam barely notices that he isn't around anymore. She misses you when you're not around, you're the constant in her life."

"And you don't want things to be this way."

She looks down. "What was different," she breathes, and it's barely a question. "What was different when I talked to you, when you were in New York."

"I realized I wanted you," Ned sighs. "Just you. And it scared the shit out of me."

\--

He puts Samantha to bed that Sunday night. Like she does on Friday mornings, Nancy has laid out an outfit, and Sam's backpack is already full and resting next to the door. Sam's in some ruffled pale violet, tucked under the covers, her gaze vaguely anxious when it meets his.

"You still feeling okay, baby?"

Sam nods, in that exaggerated way she has. "I have to go to school in the morning?"

"Yeah," Ned says, apologetically. "And I have to go to work in the morning, too."

"And then we come back tomorrow night too and I get to sleep in my princess bed?"

"Do you want to?"

Sam looks around her small room. Ned has found places for most of the other things, the assorted tennis rackets and spare desk, and now there are more of her belongings, toys, clothes here than Ned's. Nancy keeps a few outfits in a lower drawer of his dresser, but nothing like this. Nancy may not be anywhere near ready to move in with him, but it seems Sam is.

"I like my princess bed."

So much has changed for her, but it's hard to remember it, because in the time he's known her his own life has gone upside-down and back again, and she isn't broken or scarred or damaged by it. Not now. Maybe it's too soon, maybe when she turns twelve she'll hate them both, but for now it's all very clear. She had no father, except for erratic weekends and even more scarce holidays, and now she has Ned, and a mother who is happy, and a grandfather who dotes on her. More houses and toys. There's no downside.

"How about when we're having breakfast in the morning, we talk to your mom about it?"

Sam pouts a little. "Banana pancakes?"

"Or cherry pop tarts."

Sam pulls her yellow dog close. "Okay."

He checks the night light and tells her goodnight before closing the door behind him. His apartment is dark, the television off, empty and dim. He listens and the springs squeak when Sam shifts, he holds himself perfectly still and he can almost feel Nancy breathing from another room, behind a closed door.

He thinks about a drink, he's been thinking about a drink too much, so he wastes half a beer, chugging half of it in five minutes. He pours the rest of it down the sink and takes a palm of water to rinse his mouth out.

He hasn't smoked in months but he wants a cigarette, and as far as he knows Nancy quit cold. He keeps a battered stale pack shoved deep in the detritus of a desk drawer, but they are if anything precoital and he doesn't want to jinx it.

"Hey."

She's dragged her hand through her hair, over and over, it's messy and from the angle of her shoulders he can tell she's tense. She's also in something that shines where the light hits it and hugs all her curves close, as she leans against his headboard, already under the covers.

Ned closes and locks the door behind him, and he can see her only in the muted light streaming through the curtains, but her eyes are wide. "Is she okay?"

"She's fine." He strips his shirt off and tosses it in the direction of the hamper. "She wants banana pancakes in the morning and she wanted to know if you'd be spending Monday night over here. Are we getting up at the usual time?"

Nancy tilts her head slightly, then nods, her eyes steady on him, watching him set the alarm. Then she reaches over and threads her fingers through his belt loops, tugging him close to her. "C'mere," she drawls, her mouth curving up.

"Slow?"

"However you want it," she promises, tossing back the covers. The thin abbreviated slip has ridden up to her hips and her eyes are gleaming. "Although if I know you, it won't be slow for long."

He smirks and unfastens his jeans. "You have been torturing me this whole weekend," he accuses her mildly.

"Hey. I didn't make Sam sick."

"I'm sure you didn't." She pushes herself up and tugs her slip off, and her breasts are pale and full, and she laughs softly when his hands trail down to her thighs. She pushes herself up on her heels, obliging him, and then she's naked, flat on her back in his bed, with her red-gold hair spilled on the pillow around her head and her lips curved up and soft.

He kisses her and every single inch of his skin wants to touch hers, wants to feel hers, she's soft and supple and yielding and they have minutes where he wants hours, hours where he wants days. Tongue and teeth. His kisses are hard, rough, will leave her bruised and swelled, but she meets and returns them, her nails raking razor-thin against his scalp.

He loves the smell, the taste of her flesh, the dusky warmth of her arousal. When she traps his hips between her thighs and urges him, he obeys, rolling over so that she's on top of him, but she keeps her knees spread and the angle shallow above him, and he cups the warm perfect curve of one breast in his hand and takes the tight pucker of her nipple in his mouth.

She exhales, loudly, her hips moving in a low stroke over his, and while there's something erotic for her in teasing him this way, while he's still in his boxers, he shares no such illusions. But he wants to keep it slow, and he flicks the flushed point of her breast a few more times, suckling hard before he traces his mouth wetly between and finds the other.

"You weren't kidding, were you."

There's a little moan at the end of it and he smiles. He scrapes the thin edge of his teeth over her tight flesh and she writhes a little. "I try not to kid," he replies, and pushes her knees even further apart, until she's spread wide and radiating warmth against the tented front of his boxers. She licks her lips and her nipples trace wet over his chest as she ducks in and tugs gently at his earlobe with her teeth, her breath hot against the sensitive flesh there.

"You know," she says, directly against his ear, and despite himself he shivers, "that I want you to fuck me. Right now. More than anything."

"_Fuck _you," he repeats, slow, almost musing, as he trails his fingertips down her skin, down the soft gravity-curve of her lower belly. "Sounds so _dirty._ Like I should tie you up or something."

"I don't think I could last that long." She strokes her hips deliberately, slowly over his. "I don't think you can either."

"Please dare me," he half-teases her.

"You really want to tie me up?"

Her eyes are clear, speculative, but then he moves one of the fingers of the hand cupped between her thighs, so that it barely just rests against the slit of her heat and she dips her head, her eyes going vague, her hair warm and nearly weightless as it trails over his lips.

"I want to fuck you," he murmurs, just louder than breath, the fingers of his other hand digging into the back of her neck, pulling her down until she's lain flat with her breasts pressed against his chest and her knees spread wide.

"Do it," she half-moans, her fingers fluttering at his sides, trying ineffectually to shove his boxers down, but he digs his fingers in harder until she gasps and then rolls over with her, and she's pinned wide open and vulnerable and he nips hard at her breasts as he works his way down.

"Ned..."

She wants it but her knees move until he puts the flat of his palms on the delicate flesh of her inner thighs and pushes them open. He nips at her belly button and she arches, trembling a little, he slips his thumbs between and parts her until she's spread wide and when he dips his tongue between her thighs, she tastes like the memory of the sea.

\--

She can't be quiet, not like this, not right now. He flicks her clit, sucks it hard, scrapes his teeth over it, until she's just beginning to move with and against him, just beginning to find the rhythm that will bring her release, and then he pulls back and slides his fingers up, all the way into her, presses his fingers into the wet heat of her center and she writhes, gasping. She gropes at him, finds the elastic of his boxers and yanks them down with such force that the thin edges of her nails scrape and leave hot pink trails down over his hips. He inhales hard and sharp, growling at the edge of it, ramming his fingers up hard and chuckling darkly when she gasps.

She mumbles something he can't hear or understand and he pushes himself up on his knees, crouching over her. He's close to position and she reaches up for him, wrapping her cool fingers around his cock and tugging it gently, eyes wide. He ducks in and bites her earlobe in retaliation, his eyes rolling back a little, burying his fingers in her hair and forcing her head back, but she's arching, grinding, the warm smooth length of her legs tangled around his and her breath coming short.

"Please..."

He kisses her and feels her balk, at first, at the unfamiliar taste of her against his tongue, and when she gives in and opens her mouth and he forces his tongue between he levers her legs open with his hips and she pushes herself up on her heels.

And this is love, this is what he wanted, this is all he wanted, that slow freezing New York night, when the head of his cock finds her warmth, blind in the dark, slips between, in that tight clench between her thighs, and he starts fast and only gets faster, deeper with each thrust. He buries himself until they're bone against bone, and her gasps would be screams if they were anywhere else, he moves and moves and moves and when he gets close his nails bite into her skin, urging her to come. His teeth find her neck and then in that next breath she's found her rhythm and matched it to his, shoving herself up in gentle thrusts against him, deeper, and that's when she cries out, that's when she's open and desperate and she digs her teeth into his shoulder and presses her mouth tight against his skin so her orgasm can be muted against muscle and flesh. They've never been this rough before but she keeps meeting his thrusts, she doesn't tell him to stop or shove him away, and he just has to come, it just keeps getting harder and harder and he starts to shake.

She wraps her legs around his waist, then, tightening to meet his thrusts. His fingers grope over her breast, tight enough to leave a bruise, his teeth grazing her temple and then he grips the headboard and braces and he just keeps pushing, hard, harder, harder, harder, his thrusts are tight and quick and shallow and he pins her hard with all his weight.

"Come," he starts to hiss, demand, but just as he's beginning to speak it he feels it, deep, in the way she moves against him, in the angle of her hips and the sudden spasm of her flesh tight against him, wet and deep. She's arched and her fingers are in his hair and he rides it, rides it out, she gives him no other choice and he's never felt anything like this with anyone else.

When it's over she's warm as blood against him and he can't move, he's pinning her with all his weight and his head is ducked in, his mouth against her neck, and they are tangled hard, motionless.

"Ned," she breathes.

And he freezes, and she is warm as blood and he dips his ear close to her mouth.

"That was slow?"

His mouth curves up, his lips brushing her flesh. 

"As slow as it'll ever be, baby."


	2. Part 2a

"Thanks for meeting me."

Bess looks polished. She's in a clean off-white linen suit, her blonde hair in loose waves around her heart-shaped face, and she looks tall and lean; it's all the heels, the lines of her slacks and the carefully minimal traces of makeup. She's also grinning, showing gleaming teeth, but her eyes are just a bit confused.

"Where's Nan?" Bess leans down to slide her shoulder bag under the table, then snaps the napkin over her lap. "Running late?"

"She's..." Ned's almost enjoying this. "She won't be joining us."

Bess gets a wicked gleam in her blue eyes. "Does she know we're..." Bess gestures between them.

"She doesn't know that I'm at lunch with you," Ned confirms.

"Well then. This calls for a martini."

When they order Bess opts for a salad, and she regards him over the wide frosted lip of her cosmopolitan for a moment, her lips curved up.

"I just really needed to ask you something."

Bess shrugs. "The phone works. You called me earlier."

Ned unwraps his own silverware and fumbles the paper strip between his fingers for a moment before replying.

"How did he propose to her?"

Bess's eyes widen, just a little bit. "Oh," she says, softly. "Um."

"Yeah," Ned says, stroking his thumb against the dull edge of the butter knife, short swift movements.

Bess takes a deep breath and chuckles under it, then props her pointed chin on her hand and looks straight at him. "Do you want me to start at the beginning, or before the beginning?"

"Before?" Ned shrugs a little.

"She called Frank the day she found out she was pregnant, and told him. He flew out to River Heights, practically immediately, and decided that he was going to 'do the right thing.' So he talked to Carson, and then he took Nancy out in the moonlight, in the backyard at her father's house, and talked to her about duty and honor and responsibility, and then he asked her to marry him. He didn't have a ring yet."

"And that was it?"

Ned is already sick to his stomach, just talking about it, but hearing this, knowing that even for his damn fake proposal at least he had long-stemmed roses and a fucking expensive meal and a walk along the riverbank at sunset, and that jackass just took her outside and said "Look, I got you knocked up, we'll get married as soon as we can," well, he feels like punching something.

"Well, he did get her a ring. You've seen it."

The light in her eyes has receded until it's just a hint, but Bess is watching him carefully.

"Where did they go for their honeymoon?"

"A little cabin up in New York state," Bess replies easily, like they're playing some demented game of twenty questions. "They spent five days up there and when she came back, well... it wasn't the most exciting week of her life. Not by far. But I'm sure you know about that too."

"And what would I know about that?" Ned doesn't move, save his lips, and he can feel his face paling just a little.

And Bess can only hold his gaze for a few seconds before her eyes drop and she starts tracing patterns with a fingertip on the white tablecloth. "Nothing," she finishes, lamely, but she loses it at the end and he can hear the smile in her voice, even if he can't see it.

"She told you her _honeymoon_ wasn't that great?"

"We're girls, Ned. It's what we do. We go out and drink prissy flavored martinis and compare our boyfriends' dick sizes."

Ned's mouth drops, and it's a minute before he can even speak. "Oh... fucking hell, Bess."

She shrugs. "You asked."

And Bess doesn't drop her wide grin for five minutes, and Ned still feels a little shaky somewhere in the area of his diaphragm, because he wants to ask, but he feels like maybe he's already gone too far, in this.

"Um." He loses it when her eyes sparkle. "God. Really? I..."

Bess reaches across the table and pats his hand. "It's okay. I didn't think you had this much of an inferiority complex or I wouldn't have brought it up."

"I don't," he begins, heated, but she's teasing him, and he just finishes with an exasperated sigh. 

"Is that all? You just called to get some gossip on Nan?"

"I didn't want to do anything like him," Ned says, and although he's rehearsed it a few times in his head, he's still gratified when Bess's jaw drops just a little.

"So you're really going to do it."

Ned shrugs, a smile teasing his lips. "I've been thinking about it. A lot."

"Let me be the first to tell you congratulations," Bess returns, and her smile is genuine, and that makes him feel a little less anxious, because there were two ways this could have gone, and this is by far the better one. "And good luck."

"Isn't that a little backward?"

"Let's just say I have inside information," Bess replies, sliding the stem of her fork between index and middle finger as her salad arrives. "Although, I think now you owe me, Nickerson."

"Just put it on my tab," Ned replies. "Cause there's just one more thing I have to ask you."

\--

The lobby is dim and deserted, one fluorescent tube buzzing next to the bank of elevators. Ned takes the stairs. He has too much energy to pace the car while it slowly ascends.

On his keyring, tight with keys whose functions he can't even remember anymore (maybe a key to the boathouse from the summer he spent lifeguarding, maybe a key to the back door at Omega Chi, maybe a key to a car his parents replaced years ago), is a plain gold unmarked key, and he selects that, muffling the rest in his palm. Her deadbolt is new. There are no flickering fluorescent tubes here, just the dull reflection of dome lights on the barewood hall.

He expects to grope blindly in the dark and already has his penlight out, but when he steps inside, closing the door with slow care, there is a pale glow beneath her partially open bedroom door, and he heads for it, testing each board before putting his weight on it, feeling like a faintly ridiculous and amateur cat burglar.

She has the pillows propped behind her. For a moment he thinks she's awake, but her head is lolled to the side, and a brittle-dustjacketed Agatha Christie is lain open against her chest. It's one of her mother's. He knows that from Before. The bedside lamp is on, but she's fallen asleep anyway, and the shaded light casts half her profile into shadow.

"Nan."

He closes her bedroom door behind him, gently, but doesn't lock it and doesn't take off his shoes. He still feels temporary, here. He doesn't spend that much time here. Part of him still feels that at any moment, Frank could come to her door and demand custody, and all Ned's presence would do, would make it worse.

He knows he'll have to get over that, but not tonight.

"Nan."

He's heard Sam talk in this low urgent whisper before and Nancy wakes immediately, but with him, all he gets is a slight furrowing of the brow that smoothes itself away again almost instantly. He doesn't want to touch her, because she thinks she's alone and she might go into protective mode, suddenly immediately worried about her daughter's safety, and he's not sure he could fight with that.

"Nan, baby," he tries one more time, and she stretches under the covers before blinking awake, her eyes glazed.

"Ned?" She sits up a little more, glances down, the flat of her palm sliding up over the comforter. "What—what're you doing here?" Her voice is thick with sleep, dulled senses.

"I missed you."

"Well," she smiles, briefly, lopsided and punch-drunk. "Come to bed." She pats the space beside her and nestles in under the covers, a little deeper. The book shifts and she slides the jacket flap in before slipping it onto the bedside table.

"You sure?"

She's halfway asleep again. "It'll be fine," she mumbles, patting the bed.

He lays his clothes across the chair, his shoes side by side, and he only now is beginning to feel tired. The silence drinks his will away. He leaves his boxers on and she curls up into him as soon as he gets into bed.

"I came to tell you something."

"Mmm."

He brushes his lips across the back of her neck, just to feel her shiver under his arms. "Have dinner with me Thursday."

She chuckles a little bit, and her hips shift and he thinks maybe things won't end here, and maybe there will be sex on Tuesday nights, too. "You came over here to tell me that."

"Well, no," he admits. "I came to tell you that I love you and I can't stop thinking about you and I want you to have dinner with me on Thursday night."

"The two of us, or the three of us?"

"The three of us."

She rolls over and her legs are smooth and bare, warm against his. "Somewhere nice?"

He nods, slowly, keeping his eyes steady on hers. "Very nice."

"And... so you're telling me this while we're half-naked in bed together..."

"Are you?" he teases her, sliding his palm up over her thigh. "Hmm."

She reaches up and takes his face in her hands and searches his eyes, and her lips tremble with the barest hint of a smile, but then she kisses him and his heart actually slows, at that.

"This is just a ploy to get extra sex, isn't it."

"It worked, didn't it," he growls as he pins her.

\--

He almost tells her, almost asks her, half a dozen times. He doesn't quite rehearse it in front of his mirror, but at work when he has a lull time, he sits at his desk and closes his eyes and thinks about what he should say and how he should say it and what she'll say, because she hasn't been on her own that long and it scares him a little. He's already gone the roses route, and he regrets that a little because he managed to make it hollow (what the hell was he thinking, what the hell, to turn that kind of life-changing question into a bluff and another case, it feels cheap when he remembers it), and if she's going to tell him no a thousand dozen roses won't change her mind.

He changes four times before making his way to her apartment. He's in a black suit, and when she opens her door she's in a green halter dress, skirt slit above her knee, her hair pinned up. Her eyes are anxious.

"Is this okay? I can change. I didn't know—"

"It's perfect," he says, cutting through her uncharacteristic nervousness, and she smiles, glancing down at her bare feet.

"Then I guess I'll get my shoes and we can go," she replies.

He helps Sam into her bookbag straps, and Sam's in a long cotton dress with her hair pinned up in bows, beaming up at him. "We go eat?"

Ned nods. "We go eat. And I have a surprise for you."

"S'prise?" Her eyes are lit.

He hands her a rose, on a long thornless stem, and she takes it with ponderous deliberation. Then she looks up at him, her blue eyes wide.

"Can I get ice c'eem?"

He chuckles. "Sure you can."

\--

Nancy orders in Italian. He's always loved the way her voice sounds, unfamiliar and incredibly sexy, twisting around the strange cadence of another language. Sam looks a little bit wide-eyed herself, like her mother has temporarily turned into someone she doesn't know at all.

Before, Nancy had been able to make it through a few phrases in Italian. He can imagine her jiggling Sam's bassinet with one hand, wearing headphones, imagining she was somewhere, anywhere other than that house on the outskirts of the city. For all her pent-up sexual frustration, she's probably fluent in five new languages and computer programming.

"Chicken nuggets," Sam pipes in when the waitress smiles down at her.

It's a beautiful place, off the beaten path, but even so he had to call in a few favors to make their reservation and there's a line of thin-faced trophy wives with peanut butter tans standing at the maitre d's podium. Her earlier nervousness gone, Nancy looks entirely in her element. Her earlobes gleam with the diamond earrings he gave her for Christmas, and her hair shines.

"So why are we having this very special dinner?"

He gave Nancy a white rose, twinned to Sam's, and it sits on her kitchen windowsill in a thin glass vase. At his apartment there are a dozen more in red waiting for her, long-stemmed, and he has inspected every one, and each one is perfect. There are candles waiting, wicks still white, a bottle of champagne, a bottle of sweet red wine. He drew the line at satin sheets and heart-embroidered boxers.

He has to keep telling himself that she'll say no or his heart is going to burst.

"I like showing you two off. I have the best-looking girls in this entire room, you know."

Sam is coloring feverishly on her paper menu but she giggles, delighted, and Nancy's mouth softens and curves into a smile.

"Aren't you a charmer."

Her toe brushes slow, deliberate down his ankle, and the sensation runs all the way up his spine, and he feels disappointed when she doesn't repeat the motion. But Sam's sitting between them and he's too close to the edge for her to start something they can't finish anytime soon.

"Although maybe you would have preferred we eat in?"

Nancy shakes her head, smiling. "We really don't get out enough," she agrees. "And not having to do the dishes... unless..." she lifts a teasing eyebrow at him.

"We won't be washing the dishes," he assures her, as Sam returns to her coloring. "And that's about the only thing I can promise you about tonight."

"You sound cryptic," she says, propping her chin on her hand. "Is this intentional?"

"Everything's intentional."

Their first course is a basket of crusty bread and olive oil, and then their meals come, and Nancy approves, and her opinion is the only one that matters tonight. She's been there. The sauce is thin and delicate, completely unlike the jarred marinara he usually drowns his spaghetti in.

"Can I have a bite of yours?"

Sam is quiet and decorous, and he's never realized it until now but she's not like the screaming toddlers who piss him off in restaurants, movie theaters, stores. She's contained and courteous, like Nancy, without being prissy or repressed, and Nancy obligingly twists a wide noodle around her fork and lets Sam try it.

Sam wrinkles her nose a little bit. "It's okay," she says, then turns and her bright blue eyes are on his. "Good?"

"Different," he tells her, and she nods, like this is the right answer.

For dessert Nancy orders Sam a scoop of nutella gelato, but she herself declines, swirling the last of the wine in her glass. She's still pale and steady, her cheeks and clarity untouched by the drink.

"Sure you don't want to split something chocolate with me?"

"Do you insist?" Her eyes sparkle.

"I do. Insist."

The waitress moves away and his stomach does a slow flip. He can usually put away an entire buffet. Even before, he didn't feel the way he feels now. But then, he'd known she'd say no. Tonight, maybe, maybe.

"Hey, Sam?"

Nancy keeps a blank pad in her purse for just these occasions, and Sam is busily drawing something that he can almost recognize. Deciphering Sam's impressionist works is a knack he's just begun to acquire.

"Hmm?"

"Have you had a good night?"

Sam nods. "Ice cream," she says solemnly.

"I wanted to give you something else," he says, resisting the urge to glance over at Nancy before slipping his hand into his pocket. He finds the shallow black-velvet box and opens it, then puts it on the table in front of Sam, whose eyes grow immediately.

"Oh," she breathes, grinning, reaching out to touch the pink flower charm on the end of the necklace, the matching charm on the bracelet. "Pretty."

"That is very pretty," Nancy agrees, coming around the table to bend over Sam. "And this looks like something I should keep for you so you can wear it to church."

Ned answers the unspoken question in Nancy's eyes with a little nod. The center of the flower charm on the necklace is a small gold-tinged diamond.

"Can I wear it for just a minute?"

On another little girl it would sound whiny. Nancy moves back to her seat and Ned gently extracts the necklace, fumbling the clasp a little with his short nails before securing it around Sam's neck. She grins, touching it gently with her tiny fingertips, when it rests over her dress.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome," Ned forces past the little lump in his throat.

\--

They dance. They leave the utterly charmed hostess at their table to watch Sam, Ned's jacket draped over his chair. Nancy's had another glass of wine, and her cheeks carry the lightest blush.

"I love you."

Their hands are folded together and Ned pulls back so he can see her face, their bodies still moving, swaying. "I love you too," he replies, without thinking, without needing to think.

"That's a diamond?"

"Just a little one," he demurs, looking away.

She leans in close until her breath is against his adam's apple. "You know it's not her birthday."

"I know it's not her birthday," he retorts, the lightest rebuke in his voice, answering the faint question in hers.

"You spoil her." _And he never did_, is the end of it, what she doesn't say.

"It's easy." He kisses her temple. It is ridiculously easy to spoil Sam, who accepts everything with unanimous wonder. Her mother, however, has everything already, and for a long time he's felt that anything he could give her would just be loaded and extraneous, too much burden for their intentionally light relationship. "Don't get jealous, I got you a little something too."

"I'm not jealous," she protests. "I just think it was incredibly sweet of you."

He keeps his palm warm on the small of her back, leading her gently, until the song bleeds into another. "I need to ask you something."

His voice is miraculously steady, and he can somehow feel her smile. "A good something?"

"A good something," he confirms. "And I think... that we should talk to Sam about it..."

"So we need to go back to the table?"

"Not yet," he sighs.

His throat closes up and he's quiet until she pulls back a little, staring up at his eyes until he returns her gaze. "Ned..."

"Marry me."

In the time it takes for her to draw another breath, her eyes fill. "Oh..."

He puts his hand in his pocket and just begins to kneel, but she catches his arm, keeping him upright. He would do it, he would kneel in the middle of this dance floor, make a spectacle of it, but her eyes beg him to keep this discreet and just between the two of them, and his weakening knees don't give him the strength to oppose her. He cracks the velvet box and the ring shines against the black.

"I want you to marry me," he says, and looses the ring, slipping the box back into his pocket. "I know it's soon, maybe it's too soon, and it's okay if you tell me you're not ready, but... I'm done, Nan. There is no one else."

He wants to say more, he knows he should say more, but Nancy's gaze holds him still and quiet until it drops to his hands, to the ring in his open palm. She picks it up, slowly, taking it in. Three diamonds, slender gold band, and from what he can remember about that first engagement ring, his is at least twice the carats. That's the most important thing, as far as he's concerned.

"Now Sam will be jealous," Nancy says, laughing softly. She closes her fist around it and looks back up at him.

_Answer me._ "I know how important this is, and I know we should probably talk it over with Sam..."

"Sam loves you," Nancy returns. Her lashes are wet and dark. "I love you. What more would we need to explain to her?"

"What place I'll have in her life," Ned answers, and his blood is slowing, singing. "I want... a place, a real place in her life."

"You always will, Ned," she smiles. "You have to know that."

When she reaches up to stroke the side of his face, he can feel the smooth cool curve of his ring on her finger.

\--

"Samantha..."

Sam glances up, her eyebrows drawn together slightly. Her full name usually means there's something wrong.

"We had a talk about Ned and your father."

Sam nods, still looking a little wary, turning her face toward Ned before returning to her mother. "Yes."

"And I told you how your father and I were married and now we're not."

"So there are two houses and two Christmases and I live with you and Ned."

Her face colors a little more. "Ned and I... you know how you have a room at his place, and a room at our place, and... and if I marry Ned, we'll live in one house, all together, all the time."

"And I can have my princess bed? Every night?"

Nancy nods. "And there won't be all those stairs anymore, and we'll have a backyard again."

"And Ned will be my daddy?"

Nancy catches her breath. "Something—something like that," she replies. "He'll be your stepdaddy."

"But you'll still be mommy."

"I'll always be mommy. Frank will always be your daddy."

"And I have to call him stepdaddy instead of Ned?"

For the first time since they returned to their table, Ned smiles and says, "You can still call me Ned."

Sam nods. "Okay."

And, that simply, it's over.

\--

It might be the adrenaline but Nancy seems a little bit shocked when Ned stops his car at Bess and George's apartment building. "What are we doing here, having a little sleepover?"

"No, we aren't," Ned replies, flipping his phone open. "We are not. Sam gets to spend tonight with her aunts, though. Aunt Bess is going to take her to school in the morning, and then she gets to go over to her grandfather's for the weekend."

"Aunt Bess?" Sam squeals and claps in the backseat. "Aunt Bess and Aunt George!"

Nancy catches his tie in her hand, pulling him toward her. "Do I even want to know what you had to promise to make this little arrangement work?"

"Probably not," he returns with a smile, giving her a brief hard kiss before pushing his door open.

If this were up to him, Nancy wouldn't be wearing underwear and they'd have sex as soon as he got back to the car or in any of the semi-lit parking lots on the way back to his building. They wouldn't calmly unpack the car and bring Nancy's bags upstairs, and they wouldn't walk into the lobby; he'd carry her in. They wouldn't just be exchanging grins in the elevator, enduring the interminable drag between the chimes at each floor.

Even so, she dumps her duffel bag as soon as he's closed and locked the door behind them, and they kiss so suddenly and with such violence that he can taste the faint copper of blood in her mouth but he doesn't care. Her fingers in his hair, nails against his scalp, and then she's gasping and the weight of her legs is falling open as he props her up on the back of the couch and pushes her skirt up around her hips.

"You said yes."

"I said yes," she agrees, with her legs wrapped around his waist, her eyes shining up into his.

"God," he whispers, kissing her again, and he slides his hands up under her dress but it's too complicated (but he loves the feel of it, his hands trapped close to her skin and the warmth of her radiating through the thin cotton and the way her heels dig into him, pulling him in closer) so he sweeps her up and stumbles through his dark apartment, half-knocking into things, with her laughing softly against his neck, her grip tight.

In his bed, in their bed, she makes some complicated movements with her hands and she's almost naked, but he takes nearly twice as long, thumbing each button free while kicking his shoes off. He was nervous at dinner, and he smells musky with it now, but she likes it. By the time he's almost naked she's on her back, gazing up at him, letting her legs slowly fall open.

"I have champagne," he says, although it's the furthest thing from his mind.

"Later," she suggests, holding his gaze as she takes his weight, holding his gaze the entire time. He kisses her, slow, with her hand buried in his hair, her hips matched under his. When he shifts, when he pulls back to catch her gaze again, her eyes are open, going half-lidded when he brushes the tip of his cock between her thighs.

"Nan..."

She laughs a little, softly. "You keep looking at me like you've never seen me before," she murmurs, and her inner thighs are smooth and delicate against the points of his hips.

He chuckles and shakes his head, leaning slowly down to her again, and when their mouths meet she runs her fingers through his hair, her nails tracing a slow light line between his shoulder blades. Her nails drag over the small of his back and he surges, instinctively, against her.

"On top," he manages. "I want to see you."

They roll over and she's smiling when she straddles him, his palms cupping her hips. She leans down and kisses him, and the points of her nipples brush against his chest. His breath is short, and they have the whole weekend, but his entire consciousness is centered on the movement of her hips, just above his, and how much heat he can feel, and he can't help it. 

His hands slide over her inner thighs and she sits up, tossing her hair back, like she knows what he's thinking, but he's transparent and he doesn't care. She stays motionless, even as he strokes the curves of her breasts, the erect points, until he meets her eyes. She slides down by inches and she's enjoying the almost pained anticipation on his face.

"Nancy," he groans. He slides his fingers between her thighs and her mouth drops open as he finds her slick, ready, then draws the tip of his finger, wet with her arousal, up over her clit. He holds her gaze and he'll explode if this lasts much longer.

"More," she begs, her skin gleaming softly, and her hips rock down as his rock up. They touch, they meet, his thumb flicking and stroking her clit, and the tip of his cock slides into the smooth slick warmth of her as he arches. She grinds against him, gasping, and he shudders, and soon she's clenching gently with every stroke of his thumb against her flesh. 

"Ned," she moans, matching the rock of her hips to the rhythm of his fingers, and she releases a choked cry when he speeds up. "Oh my God, oh my God..."

"More?"

She nods, vigorously, and his hand is starting to go numb but he somehow strokes her faster, keeping his fingers braced against the dark damp curls between her thighs. He pinches her nipple and on the downstroke she takes him deep, so deep that he catches his breath and can't find the strength to take another, she braces the heels of her hands over his shoulders and fucks him hard, her hair tumbled around her face and flushed cheeks. She's making a low desperate moan, one he only hears when he matches it, and he slides both hands to her ass and slams her against him, harder, matching the low thrum of his heartbeat in his ears. 

"You can scream," he gasps, and she does, screaming into his shoulder, her hips pumping against his. He pushes himself up when she still has him sheathed tight inside her and she digs his nails into his back as he sinks his teeth into her flesh. She slows the rock of her hips, releasing a low groan, and when he flicks her clit once more and tries to draw his hand away she reaches down and cups her hand over his, keeping his fingers between her thighs, her cheeks flushed and her skin gleaming. Her mouth finds his shoulder and she kisses it softly, and then her jaw drops as her orgasm begins, and he cries out in relief.

"Ned, oh..." She screams against the point where his neck meets his shoulder, her hips rocking gently against his ministrations. He draws back and she bites him in frustration, her knees shifting as she takes him in deep, and when he touches her clit one last time her release is profound. She throws her head back and screams, as his hips surge under hers and he comes, shuddering.

\--

He doesn't actually like champagne that much. He pours it in highball glasses and his sits mostly untouched while Nancy sips at hers, and she keeps her slack slow limbs bare, over the covers, one knee bent. He finds it incredibly sexy. He finds the length of her eyelashes and the way one sweat-dampened strand of her hair sticks to her high cheekbone and the thoughtful way she takes slow pursed sips of her champagne incredibly sexy.

Then she stretches out her hand until his diamond gleams on one slender finger, and that's sexy too.

He kisses her temple, lightly, her head nestled into the hard muscle of his shoulder. "Do you like it?"

"I love it."

"Are you happy?"

She tilts her head back and to the side to meet his gaze. "Yeah," she admits, and then she grins, a little, and her teeth are faintly white in the dark. "I'm happy. And," she says, but she trails off.

His heart gives one harder beat before he makes a soft inquisitive noise, urging her on.

"And it wasn't like this before," she murmurs, and looks away.

\--

"Call in sick. Stay home with me."

It's two o'clock in the morning. She's in his bathrobe and nothing else, a bare leg and most of one bare thigh peeking from between, her heel swinging back and forth as she perches on his countertop.

"Well, if you'd warned me you were going to propose, I wouldn't have made tomorrow impossible at work," she teases him, her blue eyes bright. He has the hood light turned on and nothing else, and they should be drunk, drunker than this. On their wedding night, he thinks, there will be sweet red wine, no more of this ridiculous bubbly champagne.

She didn't eat too much at dinner, not in that tight green dress, and he heard her bare stomach growling, so he started with sausage. He bastes the egg yolks with grease, slides the spatula underneath.

"I could probably leave after lunch."

"Please do. It's been a long time since I've had you to myself the whole weekend."

"Greedy."

The coffee is decaf. He kisses her collarbone while he waits for the second batch of eggs to turn to lace around the edges.

"You know, other than burning the burgers that one time, you weren't that bad."

"Thank you," he replies seriously, to her grudging admiration, after her first bite of pancake. "Besides, it was always your fault, dragging me off to some broom closet to make out with me..."

"Since when did we make out in broom closets?"

"I can remember a few times."

After their midnight breakfast, with the taste of coffee mingling in their mouths they kiss, kiss, until he's fucking her, half an inch of terrycloth between her ass and the edge of the countertop, her mouth against his skin, gasping against his neck. Her heels dig into the small of his back at the shallowest point of each thrust, forcing him back to her, and her moans build and build. He pushes the robe open until her breasts are free and when he pushes deep and her chest is against his, it's warm and bare, and he knows he's leaving the dark purple lines of his teethmarks against her shoulder but he doesn't care.

"God, baby..."

She makes a low desperate noise and her nails drag over his skin, and he grunts with each short deep thrust until she breaks and her rhythm matches his, faster, faster, she screams deep in her throat and he keeps pumping his cock even through the height of her orgasm. She fights him and then her inner thighs are loose and wide, taking the press of his hips, willing, deeper, and then she's shuddering, hard full-body shudders, hard as the clench of her wet flesh when it comes, again, against his cock.

"Oh, ohh," she sighs, her lashes thick against her cheek, as they part. "Oh my God. Maybe you'll get your way and I won't go to work after all."

When they tumble with their heavy sated limbs back into his bed, his robe discarded on the floor, he falls asleep holding his hand over hers, with her arm slung over his side. He dreams about games of spin the bottle and their games of spin the bottle never ended up the way his dreams do.

When he wakes she's pinned under his weight, her mouth against his earlobe, and in his sleep he has found and filled her center with the press of him, again.

\--

She does go to work the next morning, all the marks he left on her covered with layers of cloth or foundation. She looks cool and elegant, pencil skirt and sensible heels.

He kisses the nape of her neck when she's standing over his bathroom sink, tracing lipstick over her full lips. "You sure you're going to be able to sit down?"

"Definitely not by Monday."

"That sounded like a challenge."

She does leave work at lunch, and after they leave a trail of that cool and elegant ensemble, in its components, all the way to his bedroom, they do couple things, ordering pizza and then sitting together on his couch with her feet tucked under his leg, watching movies and drinking beer. She calls her father and checks on Sam at dinnertime, and Ned listens to her half of the conversation through the low hum of his buzz, and he misses his soon to be stepdaughter, but for this weekend he needs the sound of his fiancée, naked and desperate, more.

"Love you," she says into the receiver, just before she hangs up, and her gaze shifts away from him and the movie, the beer and popcorn and sole pizza slice left.

"Love you," he repeats.

"Love you," she says, returning to him, and smiles.

\--

Despite everything he finds that on Saturday morning he's up with the sun, making the batter for banana pancakes on autopilot. She's not here and he's making her breakfast anyway, while her mother is still curled up naked in his bed.

There has to be something wrong with that.

The scent of it wakes Nancy, as he knew it would, and she comes in wrapped in his robe again, yawning, pushing her tousled hair back. He's in his boxers and she loops her left arm around his bare waist, the diamond gleaming on her finger.

"You think Carson's doing this in River Heights right now?"

"Probably," Nancy chuckles, kissing the point of his jaw before releasing him and heading for the coffee maker. "Sam has every man she's ever met wrapped around her little finger."

"Just like her mother."

She has a cup of coffee warming her palms when they hear it, suddenly, a knock at his front door. Nancy catches his eye and he shrugs a little, and she heads for it, her feet shuffling as they slide across the floor. She puts her right palm flat against the wood and leans in, her eye to the peephole, and he flips another pancake before looking back.

Her posture is stiff and she's frozen, still staring.

"Nan?" he calls, keeping his voice low. "Is it a cop?"

She turns to him and he can see the movement in her throat as she swallows, hard, her eyes wide.

"Frank."


	3. Part 2b

She looks down at the engagement ring on her left hand. At first Ned thought, _Maybe if we ignore him he'll just go away,_ but then she spread her fingers and looked down at the ring.

_If she takes that off..._

"Nancy?"

Frank's voice sounds only a little muffled through the door, but even and good-humored, and Nancy balls her left hand into a fist, the ring still on. She puts her other hand on the knob and turns back to look at Ned, her eyebrows raised faintly. Her face is almost expressionless.

He replies with a mute shrug. This was going to happen, sooner or later; he knew that, and he knew it was her decision to keep Frank out of it for as long as she could, but it seems that now is the time, and the only thing he can be glad about is that her daughter isn't here to see it.

"Just a second," she calls back, her voice low, and dashes back in the direction of his bedroom. Ned takes a few steps, almost reaching the door, wondering if she wants him to handle this, when she comes back in wearing a tank top and jeans.

"Here," she murmurs, tossing him a spare pair.

"This is my fucking house," he hisses back.

"Please."

It isn't her voice, it's the expression in her eyes that does it. His own eyes darkening, Ned hastily pulls on the jeans, and she waits until he's finished to pull open the door.

"Hey. I know this is incredibly short notice, but I was in Chicago and I thought..."

Frank steps over the threshold and into Ned's apartment, and Ned almost expects him to explode into a cloud of ash. But he doesn't, and he trails off just before he senses the mute malevolence in Ned's gaze, and the trepidation in his ex-wife's.

"How did you get here."

Nancy's voice is toneless, and Frank glances from Ned to Nancy, in a slow series of double-takes. "GPS. In your cell. Wanted to see if Sam..."

"Now's not a good time."

"I can see that."

It takes a moment to sink in, Ned knows it does, and he doesn't want to feel any empathy, any empathy at all for this man, but he can remember how it felt the day he found out Nancy had left him, and for who, and Ned's gun is in the bedroom.

He'll need it if Frank is even a tenth as mad as he was.

"You didn't just spend the night with _him_." Frank just spares half a nod of his head toward the other man, his progressively darker gaze centered on Nancy. "In front of our daughter."

She's been keeping her hands at her sides, not flashing the diamond but not hiding it, either. Her chin lifts and she holds her voice almost steady as she replies, "He's my fiancé."

"Ohhh," Frank begins, shaking his head. "Oh no he isn't. He is not going to come within a thousand feet of my daughter. Else I'm taking her."

Nancy lets out an incredulous noise. "On what grounds?" she demands. "And exactly how are you going to lie your way into being named father of the year?"

"I didn't know being a slut made you fit to raise a child."

Ned takes a half-step forward, inching his way toward shielding Nancy's body with his, in anticipation of the building fight. "Shut the fuck up, Hardy. You're one to talk."

Frank's expression is twisted by the time he turns toward Ned. "You're the reason, you. You're the reason she left me, you son of a bitch."

"For the last fucking time," Nancy starts, her voice rising, "I left because I was miserable and you were a pitiful excuse for a husband and father, and Ned had nothing to do with that. Stop trying to shift the blame."

"Like you were the perfect wife and mother. God, you make me sick."

Nancy's blue eyes are blazing hot as she darts forward, quicker than Ned, and slaps Frank hard across the face. "Frank—"

Frank grabs her arm and Ned circles Frank's wrist with his hand, crushing it in his grip until Frank has to let go, and the three of them stand, red-faced and panting slightly, staring at each other.

Then Frank swallows and says, his voice low and deliberate, "Just tell me once and for fucking all whether you were sleeping with him before you left me."

And Ned knows what Frank wants, because for the longest time he wanted it all to not be true, to never be true, to hang onto the slimmest thread if it meant he could take her back, blameless and true.

She drops his gaze without answering.

\--

Twenty minutes later, the cops show up.

It was probably the screaming, Ned decides, panting for breath, a cut over his eye smarting badly. They broke his long waist-high table and his coatrack, and the smoke alarm went off in the middle of everything, but he hadn't been able to even hear it until after. Once Frank had started in after him, all Ned had been able to do was maneuver himself in front of Nancy, and from then on it was all a blur. They were too evenly matched, had seen each other fight too many times, and neither was able to get an advantage. All Nancy did, all Nancy could do, was try to separate them, but Frank couldn't look in Ned's direction for more than a few seconds without lunging at him again.

Nancy, for her part, had a long cut down one forearm, caused by the sharp edge of teeth or a thin-edged fingernail, and she is keeping her arms crossed over her chest, her expression stormy.

"Is there a problem here?"

Nancy shoots a glance at Ned, begging him wordlessly to keep this out of the books, out of the records. Filing a complaint against Frank, while it would give him deep personal satisfaction, would only cause problems later.

"There's no problem."

The cop, his pad already flipped to a clean sheet and hovering in his hand at eye-height, nods at the remains of Ned's buffet table.

"I tripped and fell," Nancy explains smoothly. "Really, really hard." She even forces a laugh that sounds almost natural at the end of it.

"And the coatrack?"

They had been on the floor lashing out with their legs, with Nancy shouting for them to stop it, and the coatrack had fallen over, and Frank had been half-swinging it at him, and Ned is pretty sure a few of his ribs are bruised, although he got Frank a good one. The blood on his bicep has already soaked through his shirt.

"Don't remember how that one happened," Nancy admits.

"It's always falling off balance," Ned explains, lamely, shrugging. "I really need to replace it."

It's obvious they're lying. The remains of the banana pancakes are smoldering in the sink because, distracted, he turned the dial the wrong way before leaving them on the stove. Frank's foot is tapping silently, impatiently on the floor. As soon as that door is closed, he will be quieter, but his anger is nowhere near satisfied.

"So you three are just incredibly clumsy."

"Yes," they all chime in at once, Frank reluctantly. There's murder in his eyes whenever he glances at Ned.

The cop sighs. "I'm gonna let you off with a warning," he says. "And if I leave and get called back here in half an hour, I'm going to haul your asses in to jail. So whatever it is, work it out, or we'll work it out for you."

"Thank you, officer," Nancy says, nodding. "I'm really sorry about this."

She locks the door behind him and whirls to face the two men. "You're acting like five-year-olds," she hisses.

"Everything you've ever said to me was a lie."

Frank's low clear voice carries to them both, and Nancy faces him, her eyes widening. "That's not true."

"'We weren't right for each other,'" he repeats, mimicking her. "I guess I was too much of an idiot to figure out that meant 'I'm fucking someone else.'"

"Stop it."

He pushes himself to his feet, slowly. "I'll be damned before I see you raising my daughter," he says, looking toward but not at Ned. "I used to think you were a decent human being."

"I used to think the same thing about you."

She senses it before they do and moves between them, and for a fraction of a second Ned almost thinks that Frank doesn't care, that he just needs to feel something crush under the momentum of his fist, but he pulls back at the last second to avoid hitting her. "So you're going to sue for full custody," she says, and her voice has that tight coldness about it.

"Monday morning."

"So you'll quit your job to raise Sam."

"I don't have to quit my job to raise Sam."

"The first weekend," Nancy says, stepping toward him, until she's well within his personal space and not showing a bit of fear, "the first time you take Sam to your parents' house instead of spending time with her, the first time you demonstrate that you have never been committed to the job of being an actual full-time father, I will take her and move to some island in the middle of the Pacific and you will never be able to pretend that you give a damn about her again."

"I'm not the one who decided to break up the only parents she's ever known."

"And you're really demonstrating your maturity here, breaking shit in Ned's house, throwing threats around like you have any way to back them up."

"I don't need to. I'm her biological father. He's just some asshole you're dating, who has already demonstrated a violent temper."

"You want me to call the cop back here and tell him about your behavior, smartass?"

"Look," Ned says, his voice low, but it carries. "We're going to be dealing with each other until Sam's eighteen. It's going to be a long time."

Frank shakes his head incredulously. "You think you're even gonna make it to the altar before she's fucking your best friend or some guy she met at the grocery store?"

This time Ned has to hold Nancy back, and she fights hard to get free of him. She lets out a cry of frustration and anger and he still doesn't let her go. "We're adults here, isn't that what you said?" he murmurs into her ear.

She nods, grudgingly, and he lets her go.

"My point is that we need to figure out how to get through this. Even if it's a month or the rest of our lives. Personally, Hardy, I think it'd be great if I never saw you again."

"No complaints from me," Frank says, palms out. "I'd just as soon the both of you fell off the face of the fucking earth."

"Not without taking you with me." Her voice is so cold. She's going to kill something later and Ned isn't entirely sure it's not going to be him.

"I don't care what's between us as long as we don't let it get back to Sam," Ned says, and Frank's eyes flash in anger, but Nancy's nodding.

"Does she even know about this little arrangement? That you found her a new father before you'd bothered to tell the real one?"

Nancy presses her lips together and he can almost feel her counting off in her head before she'll allow herself to respond. "We discussed this decision with her Thursday night," she says, keeping her voice even. "She understands it. She's okay with it."

"Until she figures out why all this happened. Why you made all this happen."

Before he can stop her, before Ned can even figure out what Nancy's doing, she's picked up one of the splintered table legs and slammed it on the floor, hard. "Unless you want me to talk to you through my father for the rest of our lives, I think you need to shut your fucking mouth."

"So who's trying to shift the blame now?"

"Did you ever, ever, turn over and look at her in the middle of the night, and wonder, if she would cheat on me with you, why that would make her faithful to you?" Ned asks.

"Do you?" Frank replies.

\--

They are sitting around his coffee table drinking strong cups of the stuff. The air, if it has cleared at all, still hangs heavy around all of them. Like the last attempt at peace talks before war is declared.

Frank shakes his head. "I can't be okay with this."

"Which part?"

"You expect me to let you raise my daughter with the man you committed adultery on me, with. You actually ask me that with a straight face." His laugh is bitter. "And I'm supposed to act like everything's fine and you're doing me a favor just to let me see her at all."

"You showed absolutely no interest in seeing her when it was contingent on me coming back to you."

Frank's head jerks up and he looks between the two of them, as though her discussing something so personal in front of Ned shouldn't be allowed. She is sitting next to her fiancé on the couch and Frank is in the armchair, and she is not touching Ned, maybe because it would give her too much ugly satisfaction to do so. Ned knows that he'd love to sling an arm around her shoulders or maybe kiss her, hard, a few times, just for good measure, until the three of them are tangled up on the floor again and the cops are called to break it up. Again.

"Why didn't you tell me from the beginning," Frank says, tilting his coffee cup and looking down at the dregs shining at the bottom. "Why did you lie to me like you did."

"Nothing I said to you was a lie."

"Deck chairs on the Titanic," Frank says, shrugging, but his jaw is hard. "You just left out the iceberg."

"I didn't want to hurt you."

"You were too much of a coward to face the consequences of telling me what had actually happened."

Her head hangs down at his charge, and after a deep breath she nods. "I didn't want to go through a court battle with you over Sam. I didn't want you to drag this personal thing between us out in public. Everyone already knew you married me because you knocked me up. Seeing it on paper..." She shivers.

"You still believe that."

"I know it, Frank," she says, and puts her empty coffee cup down. "I guess I kind of thought that if I took Sam, you could have your life back. Clean slate. Not that you ever really lost it."

"Stop trying to sound so holier-than-thou," he says, his voice rising. "Like you did this all because you cared about me. Like this was all just a way to make me happy."

"Neither one of us was happy," she shoots back. "At least this way we have a chance. Now you can be with Callie. You were supposed to be with Callie. We knew that from the beginning."

"Just like you're 'supposed' to be with Ned." The vein in Frank's temple twitches, once.

"Yes," Nancy says.

"Then why did you say yes that night."

Ned digs his fingers into the arm of the couch so hard that he can almost hear the wood squeaking in protest. He's going to hyperventilate. He's going to see red. He's going to go get his gun and no judge on earth will dare send him up for this.

For her part, Nancy looks at her knees, then back at her ex-husband. "Because of Sam," she says softly.

Frank shakes his head. "No. You know what I mean. In Switzerland. There was no Sam then. There was just you and me."

"Why the hell does it matter?" She's starting to get afraid, he can hear it in her voice, over the roaring of his own anger. Frank couldn't have found a bigger, shinier button if he'd tried. "We made a mistake. We paid for it."

"And when you thought you'd paid enough, you left me. No matter how much this is going to hurt Sam."

"Like you cared," Nancy cries, incredulous. "This is, what? The third time she's seen you since Thanksgiving?"

"And whose fault is that."

"Yours," she almost screams. "God, I fucking hate you. I wish you'd just get your head out of your ass."

Frank stands, taking a long deep breath. "I want to see Sam."

Nancy shakes her head, twice, immediately, before she can catch herself. "I don't think that's a good idea. I think you're too angry—"

"You're the one who just screamed at me for not seeing her often enough," Frank says, his voice even with heavily sarcastic calm. "So I want to see her. I came and found this nightmare and I want to see her. It's the least you can fucking do for me, after all this."

Nancy pushes herself up and stands. Ned's afraid that if he follows, he'll break his coffee table over Frank's head. That, or a baseball bat.

"What are you going to say to her?"

"The truth." Frank's expression is challenging, with just the barest trace of black humor. "You wouldn't expect anything less of me."

"And what, exactly, is the truth. Frank." Nancy crosses her arms over her chest.

"That you took her away from me and her grandparents and the only home she's ever known just because you were too selfish to put her happiness before yours."

"Must be nice to be so damn sure of yourself."

"It is," he replies, sighing. "It really is. Here I was, thinking that working all the time had driven you away, and you'd just need some time to figure out what was important. Instead, you settle for him."

The only thing keeping Ned from vaulting across the floor and starting things up again is the thought of replacing his coffee table. "Maybe she just wanted to know what a real honeymoon felt like," he hears himself saying, and he flushes but this is almost better than lashing out with his actual fists. "I heard you weren't quite up to par in that department."

Frank's own face flushes almost scarlet, and he glances at Nancy with the promise of lingering, painful death in his eyes. "She had nothing to complain about."

Ned gets to his feet slowly. Nancy really will murder him later. He's made peace with it. "I made her come the first time we slept together," he says, watching Frank's face, relishing it. "In there." He points at his closed bedroom door. "I made her scream. Last night, actually."

"You motherfucker," Frank says, and the coffeetable be damned, Ned has been aching for this. He catches Frank's first, ill-considered punch and lands one square on the other man's jaw, snapping his head back.

Then Ned feels Nancy punch him in the shoulder, hard. "Stop it right now."

Frank takes advantage of the distraction to throw a hard punch at Ned's already bruised ribs, and they're both awash in the red now. Neither of them cares. Whatever Nancy shouts after that is incomprehensible, and they somehow narrowly miss breaking anything else, tangled on the floor. Frank keeps aiming for Ned's head, and Ned keeps lashing out with his legs.

Then Nancy dumps a bowl of cold water on them both, and they stop, shocked.

"As flattering as it is that this turned into some sort of pissing contest over me," she says, the sarcasm unmistakable, "stop it before the cops get called again."

Frank tries and succeeds to connect with one more punch and as he's going down Ned draws his leg back and catches Frank in the chin with his heel. Nancy kicks Ned's side, lightly, with her bare foot.

"Fucking stop it, both of you," she hisses.

"You really are a slut," Frank pants, looking up at her.

"I'm really glad you shared that, because your opinion means the world to me. Get the hell up and get out of here before you two break something else."

"Not until you tell me where Sam is."

Nancy sighs. "Ned and I will go with you."

Ned snickers. "Oh, that's going to go real well."

She doesn't even bother glancing at him when she says, "Don't think you're not on my shit list either."

"I'm not going with the two of you. I'm going to see her alone. She's my daughter."

Nancy sits down on the couch, still close enough to hit both of them if they make any threatening movements, and presses her palms together. "And this didn't go well. At all. You're angry. And whatever you're thinking of saying to her is just going to make things worse."

"You think I'm as petty as that?"

She pauses, then shakes her head slowly. "It wasn't supposed to go like this," she sighs. "I didn't want things to get like this."

"You should have thought of that before you—"

"You should have thought of this before you asked me to sleep with you and then never called me again," she snaps back, interrupting him. "We knew this wouldn't work. We knew that whatever trouble we were having with Ned and Callie, it was temporary. Then I don't hear from you for months. I didn't know it wasn't going to be any different once we were married."

Ned closes his eyes. God, it fucking hurts to hear her talk about what happened then to Frank as though it's nothing, between them. He hates the familiar exasperation in her voice, that Frank knew back then that he had been mad at her. And he had. Because he was afraid that something like this would happen.

Almost prescient, really.

"So if we'd been smart about this from the beginning you would have just gotten rid of her before she was even born and we wouldn't have even gotten into this fucking mess of a relationship," Frank says, but he's shouting at the end of it, his face is flushed with rage, and Ned has his fists clenched a moment later.

"I didn't say that," Nancy says, and she's so angry but the anger isn't quite enough to keep her eyes from shining with sudden tears. "Go to hell. You total fucking asshole."

She almost runs back through the apartment and slams his bedroom door hard behind her. And Ned can feel the anger thick in his throat when he looks at Frank, and the expression on Frank's face is a mirror of his own.

They don't say anything and Ned can't hear anything from behind his door, but it could be the echo of his pulse in his ears that is blocking everything else.

"I think you need to leave."

Frank shakes his head. "Yeah. I want. To see. My daughter."

"No."

Frank pushes himself up. "You want to interfere with the custody arrangements? Please. Please do."

Ned counts to ten in his head. Frank's right. He has no defined with relationship with her, it's nothing more than a ring around her finger, and he has no legal say in this.

Not that he wants to give Frank the satisfaction of confirming it.

He swings up off the couch and passes Frank, shoving his shoulder hard against the other man's, before pushing his bedroom door open. "Nancy," he says softly.

"Throw him the fuck out," she says, rubbing at her eyes. She's sitting on the edge of his bed, bent double with her chest against her knees, and at the naked pain on her face he feels his heart beat once, hard.

"Right," he says, and he turns, and he's going to like this.

"N—no," she chokes out, combing her hair back from her face. "No. No. Tell him—we have to go with him, we have to, oh, fuck..."

And Ned stops, holding himself motionless, for just a moment before he turns and shuts the door behind him, closing himself in with Nancy. "Tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it," he says, kneeling down in front of her, until he can see into her downcast bloodshot eyes.

"Get him out of my life," she bursts out, her voice muddy with tears. "Make sure he never gets anywhere near my daughter again."

In that other room, where Frank Hardy is poisoning the air with his building rage, he is thinking something like those same words, about Ned, and Ned knows it._ He is the reason,_ they're both thinking. _If he weren't here, if he didn't exist, this wouldn't be happening._

He touches her hands, hesitantly at first, and they're wet and shaking just a little, and he hasn't seen her like this in a long time. "I can go kill him."

She chokes in a laugh at that, just a small one. "Yeah," she says, and looks away. "I haven't been learning criminal law at my father's knee all these years for nothing."

"And we can do it," he swears, quietly, but there is no conviction in his voice, and all he wants is to see her smile. "I'll do whatever you want me to."

She brings her hands up to her face and wipes the tears away, then rests her hands on his again. "An hour," she sighs. "God, I don't want to do this. No. Tell him to meet us for lunch in River Heights and we'll bring her there."

"You want me there?"

She shakes her head. "I am not going to be able to make it through the rest of the day without you," she admits. "And I know you really wanted this weekend all to ourselves but I think tonight I need Sam with me..."

Ned nods immediately. "Yeah. I understand."

She sighs again. "Pizza Spot. That's nice and unthreatening."

\--

After they have negotiated the terms of this disaster, once Nancy has shown her ex out with her eyes still bloodshot and wet, she stands in the middle of the floor holding her cell phone.

Then she looks up at Ned and her eyes are shining again.

"This weekend was supposed to be perfect," she says.

"Yeah," Ned agrees. "It was."

She comes over to him and raises her arms, like a child, and he lifts her up. She wraps her legs around his waist and rests her head on his shoulder, and he props her weight on the back of the couch and they don't speak for a long time.

"You can still get out of this, you know."

Ned snickers, incredulous. "Hey. It's a rule. Once furniture has been destroyed, there is no backing out."

She chokes back a laugh. "I'm really sorry about that," she admits. "This is my fault."

"It was my fault," Ned shrugs. "I let him get to me, and I didn't have to."

She pulls back, to meet his eyes. "And what was that about my honeymoon? And that little territorial neanderthal contest?"

Ned shakes his head, breaking their gaze, heat rising a little in his cheeks. "I just knew that would get to him."

She gazes at him speculatively, then sighs. "You probably confused him," she says, airily. "He's probably still trying to figure out what 'come' means."

He chuckles under his breath and puts her down, then unfastens his jeans. "I'm gonna take a shower. And if you want to help, maybe kiss all my bruises and make them better..." He pushes his lower lip out in a mock pout.

"And reward you for acting like some steroid-crazed middle schooler?" She raises an eyebrow at him.

"And repay me for handling that situation with such grace and skill," he corrects her.

"Can we just say, now that it's out in the open, that we are not going to talk about our sex life in front of other people? Especially my ex?"

"So I guess in front of Bess is okay?"

In his bathroom, Nancy finishes pulling her shirt up over her head to reveal her shock-rounded mouth and bare breasts. "What?"

Ned pauses with his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his boxers. "Apparently you guys talk about," he says, and when he falters he makes a brief vague gesture at waist height.

Somehow she understands him, and has the grace to blush. "She said that to you? When?"

"I saw her for lunch a few days ago. And she," he pauses for a second, then decides that he's probably already done all the damage he can, "is the one who told me that your first honeymoon wasn't the earth-shattering experience it was meant to be..."

"Man, is she going to get it the next time I see her." Nancy's shaking her head even as she steps out of her jeans and panties, and Ned's train of thought and comprehension of her words ends in that second. "So what else did she say?"

He looks up at her. "Um," he begins, looking her up and down, then furrows his brow. "What were we talking about?"

"Come on," she sighs, pulling his boxers off for him. "I think you remember how this part goes."

He does remember how that part is supposed to go, but it doesn't. She's a thousand miles away and wherever it is, it's not pleasant at all, and she's not letting him follow. He checks his ribs and she climbs out, she's drying her hair by the time he emerges wrapped in a towel, his chest still gleaming. It feels domestic, this little arrangement they have.

"I've never been engaged before."

She turns the dryer off and tilts her head. "Of course you have," she says mildly, running her fingers through her damp hair. "Her name was Jessica and she was homicidal."

"And it didn't count," he finishes. "So how do we act around each other now?"

"Well," she says, and she's beginning to lose that distant pinched expression, so he doesn't care what he's saying as long as it doesn't come back. "I start getting jealous and clingy and possessive, and saying you can't hang out with your friends or get drunk as often. I start withholding sex whenever you piss me off. And even after you've told me you're sick of talking about wedding stuff, I'll keep asking you."

"When are we getting married," he asks, softly.

She loses much of the mischievous smirk, her expression sincere. "I think next year," she says. "I don't want it to be too soon. I want enough time to plan. Before..."

He starts to lose her again, he can feel it, so he steps in close to her and leans down until their noses are touching and the only thing he can see is her eyes. "You can take as long as you want. So next year? What season?"

"Spring," she murmurs. "I think that's fitting."

"In a church?"

"I don't know," she whispers, and her eyes close when he reaches up to cup her cheek. "I don't know. Why did this have to happen today?"

"I'm glad it did," he says, stroking her cheek with his thumb. "It will be finished. I really, really hated him not knowing about us. Made me feel like you thought I wasn't good enough for you."

He has to fight to keep his voice steady at the end of it, and her mouth falls open as she searches his eyes. "Oh, Ned, it wasn't like that at all. It wasn't. I knew he was going to be an asshole about it, about everything, and, well," she shrugs a little, because she was right. "But I'm sorry."

"Did you really think he'd fight for Sam if he knew?"

She nods, vigorously. "Yes. And he would have left her with his parents to raise, and I would have been able to see her on the occasional weekend and every other holiday, and it would have broken my heart."

"But he can't do that now."

She shrugs, then sits down on his bed. "We're already divorced," she says. "He can't prove any of the things that would give him the right to take her away from me, because they aren't true. But I'm going to have Dad stay for lunch, anyway. Maybe with him around, you two will behave yourselves."

"I behaved," Ned protests. "He started everything."

She smiles wanly. "Yeah, well. Just don't finish it."

\--

At the Pizza Spot she scrubs the palms of her hands on her jeans, her breath audible. "I don't want to do this."

"We already have," he says, patiently. "The hard part's over."

She shakes her head. "The only thing I'm happy about is that she's not going to entirely understand what he says to her. Yet."

"She hasn't heard your side of it yet."

"That's true," she says, then flips down her mirror to check her hair and swimming eyes before turning to him. "Okay. This isn't the worst thing that could happen, right?"

"Right," he says firmly. "It could be much worse."

"How?"

"I can't think of anything," he admits. "Can't your father just have him killed?"

"That would look really bad for his career," she says, rolling her eyes playfully, as she finally pulls the handle and swings out of the car.

Frank's watching from across the street, still in his own car, scoping out the situation like the good spy that he is. Carson and Sam are already inside; he sees Carson's vacant car parked in the lot, and Sam in a booster seat at one of the window booths.

"Mommy!"

Nancy reaches for her daughter, closing her eyes as she swings Sam up to press against her chest. "I've missed you, baby."

"Miss you," Sam parrots back, wrapping her arms around her mother's neck. "Going home?"

"In a little while," she sighs. "We're going to have lunch here first."

"Ned!"

"Hey," Ned says, returning Sam's beaming grin, afraid to sweep her into his arms in case Frank sees and they end up having to replace a plate-glass window. He can imagine it already. "Thanks for being such a good girl this weekend."

"Can I show Grandpa my new necklace?"

"I don't have it with me, baby," Nancy apologizes, looking down at the table. "I don't know where to sit."

"Sit across," Carson suggests, looking between the two of them. "Ned, you can sit next to me. I don't think we've had a talk yet about that ring on Nancy's finger."

"Oh, that?" Ned shrugs, smiling as he slides in next to his future father-in-law. "It's nothing. Maybe next year, if everything works out."

"Did Nancy tell you what I told her, when she said you two were seeing each other again?"

"Don't think so, sir."

"Dad," Nancy hisses, then makes a brief gesture. "Later. Or never, please."

The three adults look up when Frank approaches the table. Sam keeps coloring for a few seconds before she looks up. "Daddy!"

"Hey Sam," Frank says, sliding into the only vacant seat, next to Nancy and across from Ned. He doesn't even spare a glance at the other man. "Have you been okay?"

Sam nods. "Want me to draw you a picture?"

"I'd love that," he says, then settles back. "Have you three had enough time to think up something?"

Carson clears his throat. "She already knows what's going on," he says.

"Does she know what's already happened?"

The waitress approaches their table and Ned sees Nancy relax visibly, her hand trembling a little. They're not close enough for him to reassure her with a touch or the brush of his foot against hers. Knowing Frank, that would only end up in an ankle-bruising kicking match under the table.

"What can I get you?"

"Quarter cheese, quarter pepperoni, and half supreme," Ned orders, without thinking. They used to come here all the time with Bess and George, and now, when they order pizza, they get a quarter plain for Sam.

"Pizza?" Sam claps.

"Yeah," Ned says, his face softening into a smile as he looks at her, and he can feel the heat of Frank's gaze on him. "And I'll have a regular soda."

Once the waitress is gone, Frank touches Sam's hand to bring her attention to him, and away from Ned. "Have you and Mommy talked about what's going to happen?"

Sam nods. "I'm going to get to stay in my princess bed all the time."

Frank doesn't know what it means, so Ned jumps in, ignoring Nancy's expression. "The bed she has at my apartment."

Frank glances over at Carson, whose own expression is mild, before he looks back at his daughter. "Did Mommy tell you that when she took you away from me, it hurt me?"

"Where?" Sam demands, and Nancy moves to tuck her scratched arm away from her daughter's sight.

Frank taps the space over his heart and Ned almost doesn't stop himself from rolling his eyes. "Inside, where you can't see."

Sam tilts her head. "Is there blood? Like when Tommy fell on the playground?"

Frank shakes his head. "No, there isn't. It's not like that. She hurt me when she decided that I couldn't be your father anymore."

Sam crinkles her brow. "No."

"No?"

"I told her that you're still her father," Nancy says, softly. "She asked."

"Sam, do you want to come home with me?"

Sam has already picked her crayon up again and is making a cloud green. "Come home? To my princess bed?"

"No, to your home. To the house we lived in on the lake."

"Is Ned going to come make pancakes?"

"No," Frank sighs. "He isn't."

"Will you make pancakes?"

"If you want me to."

The cloud no longer matters. Everything on Sam's paper menu is now crossed in lines of bright, verdant green. "And Mommy come too?"

"No, baby," Nancy says softly. "I can't go... I can't go with you there."

Sam pouts. "I want to stay with Mommy," she says, and there's an edge in her voice.

Frank sighs, angrily, and he's beginning to flush. "She hurt me, she hurt us," he begins. "Him? He isn't your father. He never will be."

"He's Ned," Sam returns, serenely.

"Yeah," Ned chimes in, under his breath, too softly for Frank to hear.

"Would you want to go with me if Mommy would go too?"

Nancy buries her face in her hands and Sam thinks a minute, then nods. "If I can bring my yellow dog too. And if Ned can come and sing to me in the morning."

The pizza comes, and they occupy themselves in dividing the pie between the plates. Sam watches with more interest than she's exhibited following the entire conversation with her father, and when Carson starts to cut her slice into smaller pieces for her, Sam extends her hands, opening and closing them, to Ned so that he'll lift her out of her seat. 

"You planned this," Frank hisses to Nancy, loud enough for Ned to hear, as Ned lifts Sam up and plants her on his leg.

"I wouldn't have," Nancy says, her voice muffled through her fingers. "She's comfortable with him. She's seen him a lot more often than she ever saw you."

Ned shifts Sam to his other knee, toward Carson, watching Frank carefully in case he makes a move and Ned needs to bolt out of his seat, but after holding himself still, the anger building, for a moment, Frank makes a frustrated noise and pushes himself out of the booth.

"You did this on purpose," he accuses her.

And Nancy doesn't bother glancing around at the other patrons, she just meets his eyes, her own flashing. "I didn't have to," she responds. "I begged you to spend time with her. You did this to yourself. You happy yet? Did you get what you wanted?"

Frank turns on his heel and stalks out of the restaurant, and all three of them watch him cross the street, slam his car door behind him, and spin his wheels in his haste to leave.

"Not going?" Sam asks, around a mouthful of pizza.

"Not tonight," Nancy says, rubbing at her eyes. "Not tonight, baby."

\--

They go to Ned's parents' house for the afternoon, because he thinks it's time and they haven't been through the introductions, not really. Sam has met them, for dinner at Carson's, but then they weren't her grandparents. Carson stops over at the office and the three of them are alone for the drive to Mapleton.

"You okay?"

Nancy nods. "I think... but I don't think he's finished."

Ned shrugs. "The only thing I'm worried about is the first time we have to send her to his place for a weekend."

Nancy buries her face in her hands. "Oh, my God."

He puts his hand on her arm. "What would you have done differently," he says, softly. "There's nothing you could have done."

"I know," she moans.

When they pull up to his parents' house and Nancy looses her from her carseat, Sam stands in the yard looking up. "Ned's mommy and daddy live here?"

"Yeah," Nancy confirms. "You remember. They came over to Grandpa's house and we all had dinner."

Sam nods, a little uncertainly. "Toys?"

"If you're lucky," Ned teases her, patting her head as they walk up to the door. "I'm sure they still have some things from when I was little."

Maybe they do, but Nancy takes in the variety of frilly dolls and gleaming new books and knows that Ned has never touched these things, and that they probably knew his intentions for this weekend before she herself did. While Sam and Edith sit in the middle of the living room floor, with James looking on, Ned excuses himself and Nancy follows him up to his old room.

There's still a picture of her in its frame on the table by his bed. Ned walks over to it.

"You're surprised to see it," she observes. "Where was it?"

Ned shrugs a little, still staring. "Mom must have put it somewhere," he murmurs. "I haven't been up here in a while. Hasn't been a reason."

The shelf runs all the way around the room and is still crammed with trophies, medals, plaques, football helmets, autographed bats, a basketball in a glass case. She can remember band posters, too, movie posters. She found him an old one in an antique store one day, and his mother had it framed; it's the only one still here. The bedspread is the same, though.

She sits down on the edge of his bed. "Your parents have been dying for a grandchild."

It isn't a question, and he smiles in response. "They keep asking me when they can see her again."

Nancy lets herself fall back onto the bed, to stare up at his ceiling. "We should have had a nap by now," she says, blinking slowly.

"Move over and we still can."

After dinner they all sit down on the couch, and Sam pronounces the news boring. In the Sam emergency survival kit, the backpack that goes with her on all her overnight visits, are spare copies of her favorite movies, a few dolls, an enormous blank sketchpad and a spare pack of crayons. She picks out one that they haven't seen in a while, and halfway through James makes her a banana split, which wins her over utterly.

"She can stay with us tonight," Edith says softly, while Sam is held spellbound by the screen.

"We couldn't," Nancy begins, shaking her head.

"If she's okay with it," Edith continues, smiling. "We have everything here. We can take her to church in the morning if she has a dress with her, and we can all meet for lunch tomorrow."

"I don't know," Nancy says, and glances over at Ned, whose expression is bemused.

"I do," Edith says firmly. "You two need some time to yourselves."

"But after today," Nancy begins, then trails off again. "Ned..."

"I'll talk to Mom and Dad about that," he says. "If you'd feel more comfortable having her with us, I'm not going to say you can't. Not tonight. Just see if Sam's okay with it."

They talk about it, quietly, once the movie is over and Sam is rubbing at her eyes. Nancy takes her up to Ned's old bedroom and she stands in the doorway holding her mother's hand, looking around.

"Not as good as my princess bed."

Nancy stifles a smile. "Nothing's as good as your princess bed," she agrees. "You don't have to stay here tonight. Or if you do, and you wake up and want to be with Grandpa, or me, all you have to do is tell Ned's mom and dad, and they'll call us and we'll be right here."

Sam nods. "Does Ned's daddy make pancakes?"

"Ned's daddy makes great pancakes," Nancy admits. "Just like the ones Ned makes you in the mornings."

And Sam sets her mouth, her hand small in her mother's. "Want to go home with you," she says, her voice low but stubborn.

Nancy relaxes, just a little. "Then we'll go home."

Edith and James are both disappointed, Nancy knows that, but she feels her heart beat a little faster whenever Sam's not in her sight. Frank won't be back, not so soon, not tonight, but it will happen someday. Frank will try to find a way between them, just as he thinks they've already begun to separate her from him.

"Well," Edith says, reaching for Sam, and Sam suffers herself to be lifted in her new grandmother's arms, "if you aren't going to stay with us tonight, will you promise to come see us again soon? And maybe talk your mother into coming down to the lake with us sometime, when the weather is nice, to stay for a while?"

Sam nods solemnly. "Okay."

"Be good," Edith tells her son, kissing his cheek. Then she turns to Nancy, allowing the younger woman to take her daughter back. "And do come see us soon."

"I will," Nancy promises. "We will."


	4. Part 3

Sam's bedtime is eight, when she makes it that far. They are back in Chicago by then. Nancy dropped Ned off at his place, with the understanding but not the explicit instruction that he join her at her own apartment.

_If he even wants to._

"New story," Sam demands. She's sitting up in her bed, and it's not the princess bed, not quite that great, but the yellow dog is tucked in beside her. She's never named it. It's just yellow-dog, all one word, and misplacing or forgetting it on trips is the highest offense in Sam's entire world. She has her chin tilted up just-so and in this light she reminds Nancy of all the qualities she loves best in Bess. Sam looks like she could take on the entire world with one fist raised.

She probably could. She probably will.

There are no new stories in this room. Sam's bedroom is bare apartment walls that Nancy can't paint without breaking her rental agreement, a few pictures of ballerinas and unicorns, and a toddler bed. Frank kept all the old things, the things Sam used to have, and she knew that in the back of his head, until today maybe, he'd watched her leave and thought that soon she would be moving it all back in, that she was just wasting her energy filing those papers and demanding visits. She'd see what she did wrong and come back to him. She just needed time. Soon Sam will be too big for the toddler bed at her father's house, and she can't imagine Frank finding the time to go into any department store and buy a new one, or buy her pictures of Renaissance princesses and posters of rock bands to replace the butterflies and unicorns. Sam's bedroom at her father's house will be impersonal, once Dr. Seuss and the Berenstein Bears aren't enough anymore.

And she thinks of Ned's room at his parents' house, the room he had his entire life, until he left for college and even after, and she could have let Sam have that life, could have frozen herself by degrees and made sure Sam's world never knew anything earthshattering at all. Not the uncertainty of this life, and not the joy it's brought them both, and not the pain.

Nancy knows this and thinking it, she can feel the lump rising in her throat. This is a new story, one Sam will hear one day, from Frank's lips or her own. But there is no way to translate it, no way to act it out with cooing baby dolls or painted Barbies to make it appear anything other than what Frank will make it out to be.

So Nancy gropes back into her own childhood, remembering when she would fall asleep listening to her father dictate case notes, on the creaking naugahyde sofa in his library, and then Hannah would bring her a glass of warm milk and walk her up the stairs. Her mother was gone but it wasn't because she hadn't loved her family enough, and there were no monsters, nothing that went bump in the night, not even when she started finding and solving cases and collaring the kind of people her father had put away. Ned had made sure of that.

Carson never told her stories, not that she could remember. She always fell asleep secure in the knowledge that her father loved her and Hannah would have breakfast warm and ready in the morning, and her two best friends in the entire world would be there for her, no matter what, through briars and flat tires and groundings and, eventually, gambling scandals and first kisses and international espionage rings.

Sam interrupts Nancy's hastily improvised story with, "Is Daddy going to be here tonight?"

For a few seconds Nancy is almost too afraid to glance over her shoulder, to see if Frank is somehow standing in the doorway, regarding her with thinly veiled contempt while her own daughter watches. But she has heard nothing, and she can't live in fear of it. She won't.

_If Ned doesn't make it over, maybe Sam can sleep with me tonight._

She hates herself for thinking that way. The lump in her throat is painful when she swallows it again. "Daddy probably won't be here tonight. He has work. We've talked about that."

Sam nods. "Can Ned come?"

_I don't know if he's going to, baby._

The entire day she has been fighting the dread of it, the dread that grew thick and heavy in her when she first saw Frank through Ned's door. Whenever she'd tried to imagine it, their meeting, she never could; she shut down in panic at the thought. They hadn't seen each other in years. Part of her, a tiny, romantic voice entirely disconnected from reality, had thought that maybe they never would again, that somehow she could negotiate relationships with her ex-boyfriend and ex-husband, without the two ever intersecting.

And then Frank had to bring it up. Looking at Sam, looking down at their daughter, was different. Sam is her own person, beautiful and bright and almost just like Nancy herself, and she is certain that when Ned looks at Sam he doesn't immediately think, _There, the proof of it, Nancy was unfaithful to me, and I am reminded of it every single damn day._

But to talk about that night, that—mistake, in Switzerland, oh, oh God, she saw Ned's face, she knew what he was thinking, and it was like everything she had ever built to pay penance for that time between them was ripped away, meaningless, just like that. Whether she wore Ned's ring on her finger or not, whether this would take weeks to undo, to reassure and soothe away...

She had taken her rings off, in front of him, right in front of him, before she broke her vows, before she gave in.

"I don't know," Nancy says, her face coloring a little. "I hope he does. I think I want some strawberry milk, baby girl. If I go make some, will you help me?"

Sam may not have that much else, in this transitional life, but she has slippers. They are hideous, bright-pink and silver-metallic fur, but when she saw them in the store Sam nearly lost her mind begging for them and Hannah couldn't refuse her adopted granddaughter anything. Sam puts them on with the deliberation of her age, tongue peeking out slightly between her teeth, then takes Nancy's hand for their trip to the kitchen. Their ritual is simple and familiar. Two tall glasses, Nancy measures out the milk and puts in the long spoons, and Sam takes the strawberry syrup in both hands and squeezes it in, then stirs the glasses until they ring and her laughter drowns out the sound. On other nights there would be teddy-bear graham crackers or, if they have had an especially bad day, sprinkle-covered brownies or coconut-dusted cupcakes. But this day is possibly the worst and there is no chocolate, because she does her grocery shopping after the half of the week she spends with Ned. She only has enough celery and peanut butter and raisins to make them each a stalk of ants-on-a-log.

When Nancy was sixteen, all she'd have to do was look at Hannah the right way and within ten minutes Hannah would have the apron on and dusted with flour, halfway through the batter for a cake or another batch of cookies. Instead, Nancy sits in her kitchen with her mostly fatherless daughter and crunches on a stalk of peanut butter-smeared celery.

"Sam?"

They keep a bag of crazy-straws in the cupboard and Sam is sipping her deep-pink milk through one when she looks up.

"I love you. I love you so much. And I'm sorry if things were scary today."

And Sam stands up in her chair and holds her arms out, and Nancy sweeps her up and closes her eyes and thinks that if she ever, ever has to let her daughter go, her heart will break and no one, not her father, not Ned, will ever be able to make it whole again.

\--

There is very little on television this time of night that Sam can watch and that won't bore Nancy to death. In the end, she digs out an animated movie and they watch together, with Sam curled up in her mother's lap. Sam's thumb keeps brushing her lips but she doesn't actually start sucking it.

_I shouldn't have gotten mad at him in front of her. I shouldn't._

When Ned comes he keys his way in, because it is after Sam's bedtime and they try not to wake her with knocking. Nancy glances back to catch his gaze, holding a finger to her lips. He nods, but then his expression changes, and Sam has shifted on her lap.

"Ned!"

"I was wondering where my favorite girl was," Ned says softly, and he drops his duffel bag near the door before he sweeps her up into his arms. "You're up late."

"For strawberry milk," Sam explains. "Airplane?"

Ned glances down at her, and Nancy smiles. "One airplane, then bed."

It takes the both of them to get her to calm down and go to sleep. In the end Ned sings to her, which always makes Nancy smile inside, because she can imagine him surrounded by the members of his basketball and football teams, and the ridicule he would have endured. But his sole audience is her daughter, and in front of her, he's almost an entirely different person, unselfconscious and entirely devoted. Sam might be a little heartbreaker himself, and Ned's might be the first.

At the end of it she joins in, and their voices touch, and they haven't physically touched each other since he arrived. The sound of it sends a shiver down her spine.

"How's she holding up?"

He asks it quietly, while they are touching, even if it's only his arm around her shoulders while they sit on the couch ignoring the television. Nancy sighs and looks away.

"I think she's okay."

He nods and squeezes her shoulder a little. "And how are you holding up?"

She captures and holds his gaze for a moment before replying, "I want to know how all this has made you feel."

Ned looks away, shrugs. "It's not important."

"It's important to me. And if things continue on this way, and I think they probably will, I think we need to talk about it now."

He leans forward, elbows on his thighs, hands folded. Almost like a man about to do penance. "I know we were going through a bad time," he says, slowly. "I know we were kind of taking some space in the relationship, because we did have that—that argument. I know that. But I was in love with you, I was still so much in love with you, and I thought you were in love with me, and I don't understand, Nan, we were together for so long and we came close but we never had sex, and then you—"

Her gaze drops, then, and she can feel the blush touching her cheeks again. They have avoided talking about this. Any other night, he would know that whatever she could say wouldn't be enough, but he had to ask.

"And you picked him."

She hadn't picked him. Not the way he was thinking, she hadn't. She didn't like to think back to that night, on the edge of the lake, because thinking about it only made her wish that she could do something to go back and change it. She hadn't actually let herself remember it, relieve it, in years. It all seemed blurry, distant, unreal.

"We were having problems," she says, and she can't look at him. "And that doesn't justify it. We were having problems because I told you about Frank, and you took it badly, and I knew you would because you always did. And that spark, God, it had never been stronger than it was that summer, between him and me. I think part of me thought that if things were going so badly between you and me, and I couldn't have you, that I could at least be with him, because he wanted me. He did want me. That night, I didn't choose him over you, I didn't decide that I wanted to make our relationship that serious. We were together, and then things happened, and that night... for me, that night, everything I had felt for him... I stopped feeling. I gave myself a few months to make sure, and the day I knew, the day I was positive that I was willing to come back to you and ask you for another chance at our relationship, was the day I found out I was pregnant with Sam."

"I know."

She sighs. "And I hate him talking like there was ever a choice," she says, and she chokes up at the end of it. "He had the right to know, and once I told him all he kept talking about was responsibility and duty and what we had to do for her, and if—God, I can't imagine how things would be now if he'd just given me a blank check and told me to go take care of it."

Ned's quiet for a minute and she still can't look at him. "Did you think about that?" he says, his voice low, his tone on the dangerous side of unreadable.

"I didn't let myself," she mutters. "George and Bess and I talked about every single possibility, but we didn't talk about that. We didn't talk about abortion. We talked about which one of you would make a better father." She pauses, and he doesn't ask, so she smiles a little. "We thought you would."

He lets out a breath, in one long burst, but he doesn't move or respond.

She fidgets with the ring on her finger, then forces herself to stop. "I may have been miserable with him but I think I never would have been able to live with myself if I'd killed her," she says softly. Then she turns to him. "What do you want me to say?"

"The truth."

Her eyes flash for a second before the spark there dies. "I can't wish her undone. Not now that I know her. I wish she had been born under different stars."

For the first time since they've been alone together, he smiles, briefly. "I know what you mean."

\--

He brought the bottle of wine over. Nancy checks on Sam while Ned finds the wineglasses, which end up being jam-jars, and the corkscrew, which ends up being the one on his Swiss Army knife. She and Sam don't have much, almost nothing compared to what they left behind, but Sam is happy because her future stepfather keeps a princess-bed in his apartment for her, and it seems that their nice house on the lake didn't mean that much to Sam. The walls Nancy hand-painted and the frilly canopied bed aren't even on Sam's radar anymore.

Nancy might have to feed herself on assorted ramen-cups and peanut butter crackers for the next twenty years, but whenever she walks by the frozen food aisle she always swears that no matter what, they will not eat microwaved burritos. Not even if she has to move them back into her father's house and start her life over again as a file clerk in his practice, will she feed her daughter soggy ill-conceived Mexican knockoff.

Maybe not twenty years, not with a man who gave her a diamond so exquisite. Nancy's starting to feel like the Little Princess, waking up covered in silk and down in her drafty garrett, with the promise of more to come. She'd live here for a million years, with him, but he loves her, and that is more than she can say for the expensive house on the edge of the lake, where Frank waits with the artifacts of their vanished life still intact.

"Cheers."

They click their jam-jars together. The Hamburglar stares up at Nancy as she takes her first sip. 

"Are we going to make it through this?"

"I think so," he says, after a pause. He rubs his thumb along the worn edge of the countertop, all his weight shifted, his hip jutting out. "It's not that I didn't know everything, it's just that... I didn't like hearing it come out of his mouth."

"The things he said about me? You?"

"Us," he replies. "How much he knew about what we were going through back then. There was a..." He shakes his head. "There was a point, in my head, and before then I thought that I knew everything about you, that I understood you, that I could almost read your mind, and then we started fighting, and after that I didn't know you anymore. I only knew what I remembered. And in all the scenarios I dreamed up, after, I never saw you telling him about us. Not like that."

"It was part of the guilt," she hears herself, forcing it out, almost choking it out. "Part of our justification."

He nods and pours himself another jar-full and stands regarding her, with his back against the edge of the countertop. He starts to say something, but it turns into a tight, thin smile instead, one she doesn't like. "We're not getting into this tonight."

She almost nods in relief, but then the tension churns in her belly. "If we don't do it tonight, when will we? I don't—I don't ever want to talk about this, I don't ever want to think about it, but if we're going to get anywhere, if we're ever going to move past it..."

"What if we can't," he says, softly.

She shrugs, miserably. "Then I don't know," she says. Her breath catches, once, in her throat, and she has to put the wine glass down, the cheap wine glass covered in cartoon characters that her daughter will use for juice and milk.

Her daughter. Not their daughter.

"Then we should figure it out now," she says, even more quietly.

\--

He has not made a move toward her bedroom the entire night, despite the duffel bag. She wonders crazily for a moment if he's just packed up the few assorted things she's left over there, to return them. She's tried so hard not to leave a mark in his space, on his life. Sam has an entire room there. Nancy has a bottle of shampoo, a pink-daisy razor, and a sweatshirt that's been his in name only since the time he lent it to her. When she leaves his bed it's like she was never there at all.

She finds the thought infinitely sad.

"It's like a rubber band," he begins, abruptly breaking the silence. The wine bottle is half-empty and standing on the coffee table. His feet are bare. She's oddly comforted by the size of his big toes and the square honest shape of his nails.

_God, I'm drunk._

"What is," she says, before she can stop herself. There is a Star Trek rerun on. The starfield is making her head hurt.

"Remembering," he explains, as patiently as he can in this state. He's almost excited, and if he moves too suddenly Nancy fears she will just tilt off the couch and into the coffee table, and wake Sam, and this will be the third piece of furniture they have destroyed today, and how can she live with that on her conscience. She doesn't have the money to replace anything, not the milk-crate bookshelves or the hand-me-down comforter worn with pills and faded from so many washings. She reaches for his hand to steady herself and her fingers close around his wrist, and the electricity of that contact jumps between their suddenly locked gazes.

"It's like no matter how far I go past it, and I have, I swear I have, anytime it can just snap me back and it's like I haven't gone anywhere at all."

"Then break it," she suggests.

"Did you?"

"I don't know what I did," she says, honestly. "I was ashamed and guilty and it was so horrible, I just didn't want to remember it or talk about it or think about it. So I didn't."

"The sex, you mean?"

She narrows her eyes. "You're teasing me," she accuses him.

"Maybe."

"You shouldn't have said that to him earlier."

"Nan, he's thinking about it right now. I know he is. And he's angry."

"I don't want him to be angry," she says, shrinking, pulling away from the almost gleeful light in his expression. "I want him to be so far away from me that I never have to see him again."

"That's how I used to feel about you."

She's hugging her knees to her chest and before she can stop it, her eyes are full. She swipes at them impatiently. "You both hate me," she whispers. "And he's going to make Sam hate me and I will not be able to live with that."

"I don't hate you," he says, and he puts his hand on her knee, and despite everything she can feel herself warming at his touch. "And you're her mother. She can't hate you."

"It's called being a teenager," Nancy sighs, rubbing her eyes one last time. "And she will be."

He scoffs. "That's forever from now."

She takes another jam-jar of wine. "If we make enough good memories together, now, will the rubber band stop?"

Comprehension takes a moment to dawn. "Maybe."

"Do you remember," she says, swirling the liquid in her glass, "when we were at prom together and I told you that you'd have to put a ring on my finger..."

"And you already had my class ring back."

She nods, slowly. "I loved the way you kept looking at me that night. Made me wet just to see the look in your eyes."

"I was hard practically the moment I saw you."

She smiles. "You remember when you said anytime, anywhere?"

"Vaguely," he teases her.

"If you're going to leave me tonight," she takes a deep breath and the wine protests in her full belly, "make love to me first."

"Why would you think I'd leave," he says, and touches her cheek.

"Because I don't deserve you, or this," she says, closing her eyes, accepting his caress. "Because I never have."

He doesn't say anything for a long time. His fingers are still sliding down her skin as he says, "You think I'd give you a consolation fuck."

She lets two tears slide down her cheeks, tired of fighting it, tired of fighting this. "I love you," she says softly. "And if it's over then I want it to end that way."

He makes a sound deep in his throat and pulls her to him, until she's on his lap. "I told you when I got back from New York," he sighs. "I can't stop loving you either. This has just been a fucking horrible day and all I want to do is go to bed with you, and sleep, and wake up with this all over with. I wanted this weekend to be just about us." He smiles, but it isn't a nice smile, and she can hear it in his voice, even with her face against his shoulder. "Guess it was. Just not the way I wanted."

"It has been a horrible day," she agrees, her lips against his shirt. "It's already been so horrible that I thought, hey, if this is the worst day we are ever going to have, let's go ahead and get it all over with."

He nods and pushes her hair back. "Are there going to be any more surprises?"

She pulls back so she can see into his face and considers, her expression going distant. "I don't know," she admits. "It's hard to think right now. I could think better if we were in bed and naked."

He chuckles. "I know I couldn't," he says.

She snaps back to attention, searching his eyes. "Do you want to have a child with me?"

"Do you mean that we are going to have a child?" he says carefully, slowly. He's a little bit more sober than she is, and she hates that.

"I mean do you want one. In the future. Do you want to have children of your own."

"I... you know, I thought it was funny that you and Bess and George thought I'd make a good father, because to be honest... it was a big enough mental leap for me to imagine being engaged to you, that I'd be able to corner you long enough to ask you. I never even thought that much about it until I met Sam, and even now I don't—don't quite feel like that, to her."

"Oh, but you are," she tells him, and her eyes are alight. "You are exactly like the father I wish she would have had. Given Frank's track record, you are the father she will have. I'm not saying that after we're married, it'll—"

He touches her lips. "You said 'after we're married,'" he repeats, smiling. "See? We're going to be all right."

She nods. "We don't have to have children, together. Before I found you again, I was positive I didn't want to have any more. It was just her and me for so long. And any other child I have won't be any more or less 'real' to me than Sam is."

"For me either."

She closes her eyes. "But I do want to have your child."

He nods, and smiles a little.

"I've always kind of wanted a son."

\--

Samantha is asleep and Nancy has checked on her one last time, just to make sure. The bloom of the wine in her cheeks is fading and Nancy goes to the kitchen to find something, anything to soak up the alcohol in her stomach. She finds a can of black-eyed peas, a half-empty bag of white rice, half a box of crackers.

"You okay?"

She hears him pour another glass of wine behind her and closes her eyes. She has to focus. She has to. "I'll be okay," she says, ripping open the packet of crackers, pouring herself a glass of milk. When she turns, he's already finished that glass and is pouring another.

"What, taking wine shots?"

He smiles. "Small glasses. And I like this so much better than the champagne."

"Me too," she admits. "Are you... are you going to stay tonight?"

"I had kind of planned on it." He swirls the glass and the wine goes thin up the sides, warming in his palm. "If you wanted me to."

"I always want you to."

They put in a movie and ignore it, she because she can't quite shake the weight their discussion and this entire day has put in her head. If he can't believe she's changed, if the hurt is too much... 

"Now we can be normal again."

He chuckles. "You call this normal?" he says, spreading his arms, and she looks around. Her furniture doesn't really match, Sam's drawing supplies are tucked into the shelf of the wicker coffee table, and she has her stomach-settling meal of crackers and milk next to the nearly-finished bottle of wine and jelly jar. They are watching something about drugrunners in the Florida keys and Nancy smiles because this movie is in her collection for one reason alone, a night she and Ned watched it together, and she kept it during her entire marriage, never letting herself think about it.

"I mean now he knows," she says. "And this—" she gestures between the two of them, "won't be anything like an affair anymore."

She can't read his expression, but then it clears. A fight he's not going to pursue. "And that's good."

"The difference," she explains, answering the faint rise of his voice, "is that we were together before and everything was good, and then... and we weren't, and I hated it, and I hated lying, and I never felt legitimate. With him. Now, I don't have to hide you and me from anyone. I don't have to lie to my father or my child about it, and Frank will understand and stop begging me to come back." She frowns, a little. "I hate how angry he is, but at least he won't be asking me to come back."

"Are you happy that you made that choice?"

"Of course I am."

He sits up a little straighter on the couch and shakes his head. "Nan, I know... I know what you had with him, financially at least, and I know how you grew up, and, you know I'd move you in with me tomorrow—"

She shakes her head. "I don't want to do that," she says. "Not before we're married."

"And I understand that," he nods. "It's just—" He looks down. "I've seen the house."

She tilts her head. "The house I lived in with Frank?"

He nods. "I took a cab down there while I was in New York."

The color drains out of her face. "Did you see him? Talk to him?"

"No, no. I didn't. I just... I thought, I had been thinking about you, about us, a lot, and I've been telling myself to take things slow between us, and I wanted to see if—if seeing that house would change my mind."

She looks away and touches the diamond with her thumb. "If reminding yourself about what happened would change how you felt about me."

He pours himself another glass of wine but doesn't pick it up. "It didn't," he says softly. "I want things to be like they were between us and I know they never will be again, because, even if we could... I'm not the same person anymore, Nan. And maybe it's better that things can't be like that again, because even though I thought we were happy, I guess we weren't. I just know that it's been miserable without you, and things may not be perfect between us now, but I'm doing a damn sight better than I was."

"I didn't know what the stakes were," she says softly. "But now I do, and I promise you, this might be hard, but I'm willing to work for it this time."

And he smiles, like that was the right answer, and she thinks that maybe she's hurt him so much that he'll never know how much she means it.

\--

They go through the bedtime ritual, and he leaves the remainder of their much-diminished wine bottle in her bare refrigerator before he checks the locks and turns out all the lights. They take turns at the sink, brushing teeth and washing faces, and on her way to the bed Nancy changes into an oversized t-shirt.

"Goodnight," he murmurs, sliding in behind her, draping his arm over her.

"Goodnight," she whispers, half-smiling, without even opening her eyes.

She nestles her cheek into the pillow and her skin is slightly tacky with the drink, but her stomach is settled and her nerves are settled, as settled as they can be, and Ned... she moves her hand over his.

_He loves me. He wouldn't be here if he didn't love me._

She sleeps and she can feel that extra level of awareness, because her daughter is asleep on the other side of the apartment, and when she thinks of Frank's expression and Sam's open guileless gaze, Nancy frowns a little and moves against the pillow. She rises back to awareness with her heart beating hard against her ribs, and with an effort she makes herself fall back again. Ned is here. Nothing will happen as long as Ned is here.

Then she wakes again and the world has shifted, gone silent outside their shaded window, and she can feel one of his hands low on her belly and his other hand, snaked under her, just under her breasts. None of that matters so much as the press of his erection against the curve of her ass, hard despite the barrier of her panties. Her shirt has ridden up and his palm is warm, fingers just below her navel.

She can feel his breath, warm against the back of her neck, and she shivers. "I love you," he whispers, his lips brushing her skin, and then he kisses her neck softly, and she closes her eyes again. She leads his upper hand to the curve of her breast, and he slips his thumb over her nipple through the thin fabric of her shirt. Her mouth falls open and she moves into his touch, and he runs his nail over the point of her breast and she exhales, audibly.

"Love you too."

He chuckles and then his hand is under her shirt, and he pushes it up to bare her breasts to the cooler air. He gently presses her nipple between forefinger and thumb, rolling it between, and she feels her hips go loose, pressing back against the hard length of his cock. She reaches down for his other hand and for a moment, despite her increasing arousal and the achingly slow build of their foreplay, he folds his fingers around hers and holds her still for a moment.

Then she slowly, with her eyes closed, her breath already quick, leads his hand to the waistband of her panties. He finds her other breast, flicking his nail hard over its tip and finding his reward in her desperate gasp, before he slides his fingertips under the elastic, easing with agonizing slowness through the damp curls between her thighs. His fingers reach the beginning of her slit and she bucks against him, smiling when she feels him throb in response. He gently traces just his fingertips down either side, not dipping low enough to find the hooded button of her clit, until she's opening her hips, one bent leg rising to open her to him, to pull her panties tight against his hand. He teases her, incredibly slowly, his fingers sliding all the way down until he's poised just at the bottom and her every nerve is standing to full attention, waiting for him to dip inside and find her ready, but he trails his fingers back up slowly, hooked just inside the slick lips of flesh, and she lets out a frustrated moan.

"Please," she begs.

He traces his tongue up from the base of her neck, and she shivers. "Shh," he whispers, squeezing her breast gently, and she rests her fingers against his wrist, fighting the urge to lead him, to force his fingers inside her. She bites back a whimper when he runs his fingertip up, tracing the arch at the top of her slit a few times but never going so deep as to find her clit, and in answer she opens her hips wider, bucking up, grinding into his touch. He cups his palm over her curls and slides his fingers up, over the curve of outer flesh on either side of her heat, then traces one fingertip very slowly down, so lightly she can barely feel it, but the faintest pressure is enough to make her hold her breath.

"Ned," she moans, and brings the hand resting on her breast up to her mouth. She kisses each fingertip lightly until she finds his forefinger, and that she sucks into her mouth, arching her tongue and then flicking it up the pad of his finger. His hips shift once, hard, under her. She does the same to his thumb, sucking it hard before she leads his unprotesting hand back to her breast, and her saliva dries cool against the point of her nipple when he strokes it again. Between her thighs, his forefinger presses and retreats, over and over, a little deeper each time, until he finds the button of her clit, and his fingers are already wet with her and she arches hard, panting. He traces his fingers in small shallow circles over its tip and she makes a high gasping sound, and when he pulls back after just a few strokes she cups her hand over his, hers over and his under her panties, trapping him against her, and then she presses hard and begins to grind against him, teasing her clit with the tips of his fingers.

He takes her hand, pulling it away but leaving his fingers still just inside her, and his breath is coming in short puffs against her neck as the rhythm of her hips builds and he traps her wrist in his fingers and holds it just under her breasts, with his. He keeps his thumb against her clit as he presses down through the folds of flushed wet flesh, finding her inner lips and sliding between, and he groans in relief at finding her wet. God, she's wet.

He flicks his thumbnail once over her clit and she can't stop herself from crying out softly, and then he's pulled away and is ripping her panties down her hips. She rolls onto her back and pushes herself up onto her heels, her legs shaking, and he kneels over her to pull her panties off and toss them away. He looks down at her and then scrambles off the bed, standing at the edge, pushing his boxers down.

"Come here," he demands, reaching for her ankle, and she moves toward him until he reaches for her with both hands, cups her hips and drags them to his. She bends her knees and traps his hips between her thighs, tight, her hips at the edge of the mattress. She can see him, she stares at him, and his eyes are hot and dark, possessive, clouded with arousal and lust. He reaches for her ankles and pulls her feet off the bed, crosses them at the small of his back.

"Tell me if I go too deep or too hard," he says, and she nods, her lips slightly parted. He boosts her ass in his hands to lift her to his height, and she props herself up on her elbows, her hands under her hips. She wraps her legs tight around him and he strokes his fingers down her slit one last time, and she throws her head back, gasping.

Then she slowly brings her head back up and he stands motionless until their gazes meet.

His hips move and her legs tighten around him and she groans when he enters her, and his first thrust is so fucking strong, deep and powerful. His hands, still wet with the scent of her, cup at her hips as though to guide her, but she hardly needs it. All she can feel is him; the only thing that makes sense is to move when he does, move the way that feels good, shift the angle and then meet his thrust with the answering tightening of her legs around him. His cock is so hard and he takes her ass in his hands, forcing her harder against him, and it's the angle, she knows it's the angle but he's never felt this deep before, and she's exhausted but her gaze keeps seeking and finding his, and the pure desire in his expression alone is almost enough to make her clench him even harder inside her.

"You," she gasps out, but he slows the tempo a little, makes each thrust longer, so that he's almost pulling completely out of her every time. She clenches a handful of the sheet in each fist and pants his name, and he starts slow and shallow, beginning over again, until they're back to hard, quick and deep. From the desperate way his hands cup at her hips, she knows he's close, that it's taking every bit of his self control to hold back.

Then her legs slip a little in their death-grip on his hips, and when she boosts herself back up again, oh, oh, oh fuck, the angle, the angle is perfect, the tip of his cock traces the seam inside her and she begins to come. The first clench is hard and they get harder, matching her panted breath, and he keeps pumping his cock inside her and that draws it out, and she's so sensitive that she wants to scream every time she feels him move. She rocks into him, short and hard, and when they are at the deepest point of every thrust she can feel his hips against her inner thighs, he can't be any deeper, and she almost screams in relief when he comes.

With her legs still tight around him, her gaze still locked on his and her center still throbbing in its tighter spasms against him, he tilts forward until he has her pinned underneath him, his chest to hers, and her eyes go damp at the press of his weight between her legs. She puts her arms around him, up around his shoulders, and they are halfway off the bed but she doesn't care at all. He stays motionless, buried inside her, and when she closes her eyes she can feel each tiny movement of his cock, until they are both satisfied, but he still doesn't move.

"Nan," he breathes, and brushes her hair off her forehead. She opens her eyes, blinks once, runs her fingers over the arch of his shoulder blades and sighs.

"Was that okay?"

She grins and nods, tracing her fingers over his cheek. "Definitely okay."

He returns her grin, searching her gaze. "I've always wanted to try that."

Then his mouth is against hers, gently, and his kiss is light and brief until she runs her fingers through his hair and pulls him down to her. Their kisses are slow and lingering, exploring, like the marathon makeout sessions they used to have, but for the soft moan she makes, muffled against his tongue, when he pulls out of her.

"You'd never done that before?"

He shakes his head, and when she starts to shift, to bring her hips back up to the bed, he wraps his arms around her and makes a swift movement and then they have their heads on the pillows again, facing each other.

"I was wondering. You don't generally give a disclaimer before we do something new."

"And you did like it?"

She almost laughs at the sincere question of his gaze. "I'm still shaking," she admits, trailing off into a soft moan when he kisses her again. She wraps her arms around him, slanting her mouth against his, acutely aware that they are still mostly naked, and he's so close she can feel the warmth radiating from his skin.

"You know, people generally make out _before_ sex," she says when he pulls back.

"I just realized I hadn't kissed you all night."

"You hadn't," she agrees, her gaze dropping to his mouth. "In fact, you haven't kissed me all day."

He leans in again and she closes her eyes, happily, bending one knee and pressing the inner curve of her leg against his hip as he kisses her, slow and lingering.

"Ned," she whispers, her voice rising at the end of it, after he's pulled back again, and he meets her eyes.

"Even if we've had the worst day, like today, even if it's all horrible... promise me that after we're married, you'll kiss me every day."

"I'll do better than that," he says, and presses his lips softly against her cheekbones, her earlobes, the hollow at the base of her throat. "I'll kiss you every day for the rest of our lives."

She closes her eyes, tilting her head back, her lips slightly parted. "Even if I'm pregnant and miserable and I haven't been able to shave my legs for weeks."

"Is that a possibility?" he asks, his eyes wide, and she smacks him lightly with her palm. "Yes. Yes, even when you're pregnant and your legs are hairy and you're demanding... what do you demand when you're pregnant?"

"Depends," she says. "Sometimes watermelon. Sometimes salmon. Sometimes an entire bag of chicken nuggets."

"Never sex?"

"I think, with you..." she eyes him speculatively. "I think that is a distinct probability. If I chop off all my hair and dye it black, will you still love me?"

"I will never stop," he says softly. "I can never stop. And for as long as you love me back, you will have made me the happiest person on the entire earth."

She holds his gaze for a long moment, too long, and her eyes glaze with tears before she pushes herself up and kisses him again, hard. When they finally part again, her lips are swelled red from the press of his, and they are still so close that their mouths brush when she whispers.

"Just like you've made me."


End file.
